1:22:56 Superman holding up the sky is also another example of him helping people; not just because he’s keeping the sky from crushing the Earth, but because Atlas wanted to be free of his burden specifically so he could go to his daughter’s wedding. When he comes back at the end of the issue, he thanks Superman for giving him the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle and see how shocked Zeus was at someone being willing to take the weight from Atlas’ shoulders. It’s honestly such a good comic, I love it.
And that it’s intercut with ordinary people questioning where Superman is, and other heroes stepping up to fill in the gaps. Because Supes handles so much all the time that people on street-level notice his absence! And because the other heroes aren’t rendered redundant by Superman’s existence, trust even if he vanishes it must be for good reasons, and hey, after all the times Superman’s helped all of us it’s the least we can do to pick up the slack when he’s busy somewhere else! Clark even trusts the other heroes enough to lay down & catch his breath after Atlas takes the sky back (because he *can* carry the weight of the world on his own, but not for long, and even Superman needs help!) Hell, even that Atlas *comes back* at the end, because Superman did him a great kindness and he won’t leave someone who did that for him to carry his burden alone! What goes around comes around, and kindness begets kindness! People with the power to help others should, and these people do! And that makes other people want to be better by extension! Which makes us, the readers, want to be better, pass on those small kindnesses we can and make the world better in our own way! Peak! Superhero! Storytelling!
@@positivelink6961 That whole series is full of brilliance; most of the digital comics that came out that year from DC were quite well done in general.
One superhero moment that always stood out to me was from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, where we see Peter save a kid from bullies. He doesn’t just chase the bullies off and call it good, he fixes up the kid’s science project, hypes up how cool said project is, and then walks the kid home. 10/10 that is a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
And the fact that Amazing Spider-Man is actually still doing that kind of work during No Way Home is actually pretty damn amazing, because even in his darker hours, he's still trying to be there for his neighborhood.
I am so glad people are coming around on the Amazing Spider-Man movies. There was so long there where they only ever came up in a derogatory context, and as someone who always liked those movies it felt not good to want to talk about their positives but know if I brought them up, I’d have to deal with the avalanche of negativity that came if you dared to bring them up in a positive context. Like, sure, they have problems, but there’s so much those movies did *right,* and it makes me happy to see them get the appreciation they deserve.
@@msf2399To be fair, the second movie is legitimately awful with only the minorest of positives. The first movie was definitely just overhated because it wasn’t a 4th Tobey movie, and people have gotten over that now.
The wild thing about MCU Spider-Man is that Daredevil and Kingpin exist like a mile away from him, but Disney doesn't want to acknowledge anything from the Netflix shows.
Marvel doesn’t want to acknowledge that any of their shows exist for some reason. I can take the shit with mutants and all that but there’s no reason something like the Runaways or AOS shouldn’t be canon.
Matt Murdock shows up in the most recent movie No Way Home. Which is a very cool scene imo. But I get your point. It just seems like maybe it's not as hard for them to miss each other in a city full of people and shit going down. Luke Cage is probably sleeping off a night of beating down a whole building of armed dudes. It's impossible for them to be everywhere, and it would make the world feel a lot smaller in fact. Like "Oh, yeah, there's Jones, my favourite drinking buddy, and that guy, and also that guy AND THAT GUY..." They're all busy people. And there's only so much scope a plot can take before causality starts getting messy. IT WAS THE SQUIRREL!!!
The reason being that the tv series were legally severed from the MCU with an orbital laser strike to limit how much damage Perlmutter could do. He's since been handled, so the old tv stuff is being reincorporated where it's good, popular, makes at least some sense, etc.
One "busy superhero world" that came to my mind during the later part of the video was the prologue for The Incredibles. On the drive to his wedding, Bob breaks up an armed chase, saves a cat from a tree, combats a supervillain, stops a runaway train, apprehends a thief and bumps into two other superheroes on the way. And the entire time he was insisting that he wouldn't be late to the wedding, which he almost was. It's only like the first ten minutes of the movie, but it gives an amazing picture of what a world thriving with superheroes looks like.
Three superheroes, if you count Buddy trying to be Incredi-boy. Which, you should. But that you can NOT think that speaks to the biggest weakness of The Incredibles. "Gadget using badass normals = always bad. Innate superpowers = always good." Yeeeeeeeah. Did no one at Pixar go "Wait, The Screenslaver? Is this your THIRD straight tech based supervillain, Brad? Why not have one with actual superpowers for once?"
@@Volvagia1927technically the underminer does have powers but they're not really shown in the movies, he has enhances strength, senses, resilience etc but since its not shown it doesn't really matter to the audience, in which case it should be 4 non-powered tech villains, bomb voyage with his bombs, syndrome, underminer with drills vacuum gauntlets etc, and screen slaver.
@@Volvagia1927OTOH maybe, given the real world problem with exploitation of tech for de facto supervillainous ends (surveillance, estrgenous plastics, forever chemicals) it's not bad to plant the idea that tech-without-morals is a dark road.
@@Volvagia1927 I think that particular distinction we see a lot in superhero media, stems from the idea that tech is something you need to afford, whereas innate powers is something anyone can have. It's essentially a battle between privilege and talent
And prevents a person from committing suicide. You forgot to mention that one, probably because it isn't on the same threat level as the other things he faces throughout the movie, though I'd argue that neither is the cat on a tree part.
Hey Red, there's an episode of Batman the Animated Series called "Trial" hat actually addresses the problem. A DA goes on the news saying that Batman is responsible for his Rogues Gallery. In response, the villains kidnap her and Batman and put them on trial where the DA cross examines all of the villains who blame Batman for their misdeeds. She eventually comes to the conclusion that the villains would have existed even without Batman. That even if they may have been lacking the supervillain gimmicks they would still be ruining the lives of Gotham citizens. In short, they created Batman.
What's even better? A fan had the idea that Batman, while at trial, would have asked to choose his own council... and named Harvey Dent. Two-Face would serve as both prosecution and defense, because 'Judge' Joker thought it'd be funny, and I can only imagine Harvey Dent eviscerating all the excuses the villains made.
One of my favorite parts of Across the Spider-verse was that the various Spider-people are always, *constantly* saving people. From disasters, from petty crims, from villains, they are constantly helping people because every world *needs* a Spiderman.
I think the main issue with modern superhero adaptations is that _classic_ superheroes were folk heroes, stories told to inspire people so we could imagine a world where good people stopped bad things from happening. Whereas modern superheroes are **celebrities,** and even Hollywood can't quite figure out how to pretend that celebrities have to exist.
I've been growing suspicious that Hollywood really doesn't *want* celebrities anymore, because celebrities have opinions and make mistakes and stuff. Hence the push to AI and hence the SAG strike. They don't want people. They want masks. They want lucrative IPs that work regardless of who the faces are.
This is extremely well put and is also (sorry Red) (and everyone else who loves this show) why I actually really can't stand My Hero Academia. "Superheroes as super-celebrities" feels like such an inherently awful premise for a story to me, no matter how much actual heroism you tack on to it.
@@sabertoothkimThe premise of MHA is that 80% of the populace has superpowers, and the whole celebrity angle has been called out as one of the flaws of MHA's hero culture. Heck, many Heroes resigned after the first War arc BECAUSE they couldn't take the criticism and scrutiny. One in particular admits in his thoughts that all he wanted was fame and adulation while he publicly retired. He was the 9th-ranked Hero. The other implied angle of the "celebrity hero" is that just Hero work isn't enough to pay the bills, for some. Because in MHA, Hero is an actual job due to Quirk ubiquity, not something only a select few can do.
@@sabertoothkim It's not something that every character, hero or villain, agrees is the best thing ever. It's more like it's one of the themes of the show. One of the earlier villains, Stain, calls out false heroes for only being after fame and glory, and its not something that the heroes shrug off as him just being crazy and evil. They can't side with him because he was killing heroes in his quest to rid the world of the 'false' ones, but he gives the main cast something to think about.
My Dad was an extra in the original Avengers movie and was in that deleted Captain America scene. We never ended up seeing the scene and thought it was just lost to history. When I saw you post a clip of that scene in the podcast it made me realize that it ended up out there as a bonus feature on the Blu-Ray, so I went and found the clip, and my Dad was right front-and-center at the 1:49 mark. My Dad happened to call me and I told him, "You'll never guess what I'm watching right now." It made both of us very excited and happy, so thank you. You helped make my Dad and I very happy today. I've appreciated your content for years as a lover of history and storytelling, but you added a very personal touch to my Dad completely inadvertently, and I thought I would let you know. It's wild how something as simple as a podcast just chatting about superhero movies in a loose and fun manner can help make a father and son smile, but your podcast ended up doing that. It was real touching and sweet. Thanks for that.
It's awesome when something in your own personal life happens to be directly referenced by something else completely unrelated. Especially when that thing is already obscure, even relative to your own life.
It is pretty cool to see someone you know/love "on screen"; had a friend who was an extra in Entourage, and I had tried a few times to find the episode she talked about (I knew it was in the 3rd season; not a fan of that show, so wasn't something I'd come across). But was randomly wanting a "Honest Trailer" for Entourage and holy crapballs...! (FYI, I would suggest backing up that extra/cut clip with your digital collection of family photos/videos; if the physical disc gets lost in the move, tis good to have the bases covered.)
Part of what makes One Punch Man such a brilliant superhero satire is that it explicitly confronts the issue of “why do superheroes need to exist?” Not in the sense that there aren’t reasons for heroes to exist in-universe, but Saitama’s core conflict is the ennui that results from handling every confrontation without the slightest effort, thus robbing him of the emotional impact of crimefighting. The story purposefully takes the subtextual problem of “emptiness” you’re speaking about and makes it part of the text.
This discussion made me think of something... So, I'm an English Lit graduate, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how stories age. I have a concept I call "Generic recursion". The theory, briefly put, is that stories first get popular because they capture the zeitgeist, they say something about the world that resonates with the audience and hooks people in. Then, as the years go by and the story ages, it builds up more internal history and lore, and gradually it becomes less and less about the zeitgeist and more about building on its own internal continuity. Until finally it doesn't say anything about the outside world but only comments on itself. Superman first appears in the Great Depression and deals with Great Depression-type stories, and then WW2-type stories. Big current events that weighed heavily on entire societies. But by now Superman-stories are about... well, about being Superman-stories, and what it means to be a Superman story. About being a world filled with superpowered beings and what that means for the superpowered beings in that world. Along the way, any connection to real life has been lost. And it grows less welcoming to new audiences, as it doubles down on appealing to the audiences who are steeped in the genre's history and demand expansive continuity geekery to make it all feel worthwhile. It has gone from something popular that commented on the zeitgeist to something insular that only looks inwards.
That's actually the case for movements, institutions, etc., too. They start out focused on changing the world or accomplishing something or whatnot. Then, they eventually become established, and the focus on trying to maintain themselves eventually overtakes the mission itself. Not to say that all people will become what they're fighting against, but that it's a natural cycle.
I've had a nearly identical thought but about star wars. The original trilogy mixed western and sci-fi and East Asian elements. It also featured an unambiguously good fight right to contrast America's embarrassment over Vietnam. Not to mention the complete lack of any other movies quite like it. But the Prequels and sequels got so obsessed with the lore and deliberating over the themes of the original that general audiences completely lost interest. Season one of the Mandalorian was such a big hit because it wasn't about star wars, it just sorta took place in star wars. It was a western with a star wars coat of paint. I feel very similarly about Andor but it isn't anywhere near as popular.
@@izzy1349 Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, the entire western genre, the list goes on. An example I think about a lot is the Prime Directive: originally a piece of Cold War-era political science dreamed up in response to the history of proxy wars between rival superpowers, this 60-year old idea is now a permanent and timeless part of the Star Trek universe that cannot be left behind or seriously interrogated. Because anything else would be disrespectful to continuity.
I don't remember the first Ant-Man movie in a lot of detail, but part of what made it one of the better MCU films isn't just the lowered stakes of "pulling a heist" vs. "saving all of reality." It's that Lang and Pym's motives require both of them to actively avoid being noticed by heroes; even regular police officers and security guards are a threat.
@@stevejakab274 The first movie, a LOT of the conflict and payoff was about personal stuff, NOT about universe level threats. It was about an ex-con not being able to make it in society, it was about the trauma of losing a family member. It was about blended families not treating each other like the enemy. A LOT of comic books had personal drama arcs that the character's superpowers couldn't really help with.
@@stevejakab274I think the idea of ant man squad being thrusted into the limelight for 3 could have worked, especially since it would only make sense after endgame and their importance in it. It’s just that because the story is mostly in the quantum realm, there’s no actual conflict or development with their new popularity. Granted, it probably wouldn’t be able to fit it in with the heavy focus on quantum realm
@@pian-0g445 I liked Quantumania, but it really has 2 big main problems: 1) MCU's weird improvisation scheduling. In any other logical world, Quantumania would have been the 2nd to last Phase 4 film/show, and then the final Phase 4 film(s) would be the gathering of the New Avengers VS Kang the Conqueror's siege on the entire world (basically a movie adaptation of EMH's 2-Parter about Kang), ending with the End credits of "yeah sure. they got rid of Kang. 1 of MILLIONS who are all coming to Earth to test the New Avengers". BUT because different stuff that couldn't happen. But that's less the movie's fault, and more the scheduling problem of everyone trying to do their own thing, Phase 4 being "throw everything to the wall to see what sticks", adapting to the troubled production, CO VI, etc. 2) They don't really commit to the happy ending. I like that, unlike the previous 2 films, it actually ends on a happy ending, instead of a big cliffhanger (especially considering ant-man and wasp ended like that) but could have been more. They even have it set-up with the montage at the beginning of how their lives are going. Have Scott now be a toursit guide to the people coming from the Quantum Realm to Earth (and maybe viceversa), have Hope at her company working with some people from the quantum realm (the goo guy with translator goo, MODOK / Darren, still with anger issues, some of the cyber ants). That way you can have it end in a "everything is going so well.... maybe too much" (cue post credits of the upcoming kangs)
CW Arrowverse actually had a fun throwaway line about why Constantine couldn't help the Arrow group with stuff in his wheelhouse: "He's literally in Hell," which is completely in character for Constantine and an actual good reason.
@@PyreWell except for Megamind though, at first he was a super villain and rule the city after “killing” Metroman, and then turn into a Hero after accidentally created his own Frankenstein of a fake hero man child turn Villain, and rediscovered his own destiny. Neo Cortex from Crash Bandicoot a lovable loser Villain, he created his own hero/arch nemesis despite constant failure after failure never gives up and somewhat escape the never ending cycle of platforming game, for a while at least.
@@longwlenguyen4214it's pretty heavily implied that Megamind isn't really a threat to Metrocity and is more of just a nuisance so people really don't care about him. Once Titan shows up and starts going all murder tyrant, they see a villain they want to fall and Megamind delivers.
They might have intentionally followed the plot to Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" "He travels time for the future of mankind" "Vengeance from the grave, kills the people he once saved"
The whole MCU was about Tony the entire time, really. Tony’s always doing stuff outside his own movies, he made Ultron, he backed Spider-Man, he started the Civil War plotline, he went to space and lost Peter, he solved time travel in a night, Tony Tony Tony Tony Tony all the way down it’s Tony.
@@Atle-ez7ir It was never pretending to be anything otherwise. He was the primary protagonist, and the Avengers only formed once _he_ was ready to be part of a team.
They work like an actual comic run and this seem to mirror the 60s with the first issues of Iron Man Hulk and Thor leading to the first crossover comic. And those issues and characters affected everything just like it does with the mcu.@@Atle-ez7ir
Regarding the corruption of Gotham Cops: I read a fanfic where Nightwing was in another city helping other heroes, and after stopping the villains and chatting to the heroes, he handed over the weapon the villains had been using and said something like "yeah I picked this up on instinct but actually I guess your cops can probably be trusted not to sell it or steal it, so I don't have to take it home! :)" and I like. Readjusted my view of Bats taking "trophies" completely.
so heres a thing the cops may be corrupt but their still cops, so in dark knight rises they would still go into the underground because they dont work for Bane, and the various backers dont want bane in their city either. Corrupt doesnt mean inactive it just means that they have other loyaties
Regarding Black Widow seeming busy. A great part giving that vibe was her interrogation phone call. They literally call her into the plot, while she is in the middle of another mission. This directly shows that she is busy, but quick to come when needed.
I honestly like Batman stories that give a clear timeline of how his crime fighting career goes. At first he goes after small time crooks, then larger gangs, and eventually the big boy gangsters. After taking out enough a power vacuum occurs which is quickly occupied by rising supervillains who then start competing with the regular crooks, driving them out. Eventually independent crooks are an endangered species because they can't do their thing without a superhero busting them or even supervillains getting rid of competition, leaving only the supervillain plots to foil by heroes for the most part. This is a knife's edge of peace and security but it does explain why you don't see the heroes tackling as many small level threats later in their careers as you would expect. At least that's how I always justified it in my head.
@@nathankurtz8045and depending on the story (usually comedy ones) they will state that being a henchmen has benefits (health, dental, vision, ect.) which really justifies street goons joining up as henchmen, atleast the Joker will pay for the hospital visit after Batman breaks your legs.
@@jasonreed7522 Yeah, I think it was even was stated in a serious comic by a henchman that if you survive Joker's murderious outbursts, you will be set for life, because he pays well as hell, since Joker is sorta of a anarchist who sees money as useless, he will give you plenty.
@@aldiascholarofthefirstsin1051 we can also safely assume the Joker is loaded because the stunts he pulls aren't exactly cheap. And in one now memed comic panel he says he's crazy enough to fight Batman, but not crazy enough to take on the IRS. While this was probably intended as a throw away line, it has a lot of lore implications: - the Joker pays all his taxes, including on illegal income per US tax law (its a catch 22, tell the government about your crimes or be guilty of tax evasion) - the Joker's organization has clean enough books to do this - considering how many goons he has this would require an accounting department and likely an HR department (probably only a couple people each but still) - he can probably survive an audit better than the Wayne family can, which is wild to think about (ignoring joker's criminal activity of course) Consider how every criminal has goons its reasonable to ifer they all operate somewhat like Joker because otherwise Joker's better benefits would steal the majority of the goon labor demand. And at this point you have to wonder if the government has invented another type of organization just to handle these "unconventional buisness models". (Not where i expected the comment to go but whatever, this is what happens when we run to the logical extremes of throw away lines we weren't supposed to think that hard about)
I feel like the thing the MCU is missing are sidekicks. They are the ones who take care of things while the boss is away, or the small time stuff that doesn't warrant your Batman coming out to punch someone. I loved the OG run of Teen Titans, because that entire series was basically just "Robin and his friends try their best to solve things without involving the Justice League", and they were great! The characters got to have evolving storylines without being overshadowed, the world felt alive, and by extension, it zoomed the microscope in even further on how alive the world of the Justice League was, because there was all this happening even beyond the heavy hitters going out and doing stuff all the time.
the problem with that is marvel in general doesnt do sidekicks often, theyll have members of teams rhat act as mentor characters like cyclops or captain america and older heroes will act as mentors to younger heroes with similar powers or take up their mantle like peter to miles, logan to laura, or tony to riri, but they never stick around as a mentor/sidekick duo, theyll team up for a few issues, an arc or two at the most, and then go their separate ways, dc is the property thats all about sidekicks helping out older heroes all of the time
The problem with introducing young heroes in the MCU is that they won’t be young by the time of the next movie. Like assuming we do see Kate bishop and The third Cassie Lang again they are going to be quite a bit older from the last time we saw them. Same is true for whatever they decide to do with Ms Marvel and to their credit they knew enough to get her into a project not long after her show
No. *Marvel doesn't do sidekicks.* In the Marvel Comics Universe in-universe explanation is the story of Bucky Barnes. When there's a teen hero in Marvel, they're either part of teams like the X-Men or solo heroes from the get go like Spider-Man. This is one of the Distinguishing factors between DC and Marvel.
@@Oturan20 I mostly agree, but with the caveat that it stopped doing the /classic/ sidekick, where there's the actual hero and the sidekick is somebody who's just sort of attached to them permanently like a tick. When Marvel does it, it's closer to actual mentoring: the sidekick is a full character in their own right, and is being taught the ropes with the express intent that they're going to break off and do their own thing after a bit. It also has a fair bit of the "support staff" type, where there's one or two secondary characters who usually help behind the scenes but will ocassionaly step up more directly... though that's more of a "what precisely do you consider a sidekick?" sort of deal. For some, they count, for others they don't.
That kind a does not quite work when the Teen Titans were dealing with Trigon, a demon who literally turned the entire world into hell. Like....did nobody from the Justice League show up and ask "WTF did just happen there?". When Slade was leading Trigon's army on the Titans, did Robin not think "Well, shit. Better call some reinforcements?". All we get is a funny Interaction with the Doom Patrol that shows that apparently nobody is even aware that the Titans reversed the Apocalypse, given how Cyborg has to explain that to them.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comics running during the Civil War film had a whole little sidebar where Spiderman tries to convince Squirrel Girl to join and she literally responds "I'm kinda busy fighting DINOSAUR ULTRON IN ANTARCTICA, can I assume your problem will probably resolve itself with little consequences?" and honestly I would take a whole series of Squirrel Girl Ignores the MCU
I think I’m retrospect that’s almost hilarious since his “problems” with regards to civil war are some of the most long lasting of that time to the point we now get to see him being cucked
It's worth mentioning in Iron Man 1 that Obadiah put a hit out on Tony, and he was also the one selling the weapons to the bad guys. To me that seems less like Tony creating his villain and more like Obadiah created Iron Man.
After Iron Man 2 and Civil War, it's implied (or maybe I'm reading into it) that Obadiah Stain was HYDRA and involved with the assassination of Howard Stark. This would mean that the BBEG unintentionally created Iron Man.
Yeah, Tony's change of heart wasn't because 'Oh no my weapons kill people??' it was 'Oh damn someone's smuggling my weapons'. He knows weapons kill people, he's not a dumbass, he just thought that his weapons would be used by the 'good' guys because he sold weapons to the US military(which is an entire can of worms on its own but lets not get there). His pride didn't come from 'haha I make cool things that go boom' it was 'My weapons defend our country'. He stopped making weapons and made the suit to destroy the smuggled ones because he realized he couldn't control his weapons. I really don't like the 'And then he got on the other side of his missile, realized weapons kill people, and decided to blow them up' take because it's not really correct and it's clearly a mocking take on Iron Man's motivations when basically the only two thoughts bouncing around this man's head (inbetween bouts of ptsd) is "Protect people" and "Fix my screw ups", which is honestly, one more thought than seems to bounce around in most other superhero's heads. Somewhat related, people keep blaming Tony for a of villains when a decent chunk are at best, only partially his fault.
@@allenl5960 Definitely seems like a trend that people blame heroes for a villain's existence or actions. I get it in some cases, but a lot of the time it seems more the villain is responsible for not taking the villain out of commission and they escape again. Even that is a flimsy argument when you could argue the people in charge of imprisoning them should be responsible for that, and the legal system should insure the death penalty for someone like the joker or someone similar. On the topic of the Joker, depending on what continuity, the Joker was partly made by Batman. Of course the events that lead up to the Joker becoming the Joker were not influenced by Batman as I recall, he had already been doing crimes, he just got a makeover and marketable branding because of Batman.
The crazy thing about Far From Home is it HAD a scene of Peter dealing with street level crime and protecting his neighbourhood. And it even contained a joke about him telling the police they'd have to pick up the slack while he's gone. It ended up deleted but it's in "Peter's To Do List" on the blu-ray. It's a shame because while it isn't him rescuing civvies it still has him flipping about doing fun web tricks, messing with people and quipping, and even bantering with the local cops in a way that implies he has rapport with them (aka does this a lot)
This whole Sherlock/Moriarty thing also reminds me of another thing : how I feel like nowadays people just think Episodic storytelling is bad storytelling ? Like, if an episode of something is self-contained, it's seen as "Filler" or "Skippable". I love the show Amphibia, and it annoys me how many people are willing to tell people to Skip episodes because they don't matter to the plot. It's as if they just want to know the plot without feeling the emotions of it ? Self-contained episodes can do wonders to build the world, and the characters. Making both feel alive. If everything is always part of the "Bigger Plot" or part of some villain's schemes, it can really REALLY kill the worldbuilding IMO (see the ending of Naruto for example)
I was seeing another thread elsewhere about how people are wishing for a return to episodic storytelling, actually. So you're certainly not the only person with this feeling. Part of the problem is that the reason for specific styles of storytelling aren't really about the story, but rather about how publication and distribution happen, so the stories have to fit their media. And right now, there's a prestive TV craze, so everything has to be tightly written 8-episode seasons. Who knows where we'll be in ten years.
Ooh, yeah, that is a very interesting question actually. Like, I will say that personally, I tend to like shows with a sense of overarching plot the best, but I don't think that's so much an attraction to having some big bad that gets constantly built up, but rather, a want to see the protagonists themselves grow and develop through the show, and that can absolutely happen through episodic storytelling. Take something like A:TLA for instance, and also Amphibia, like you said! Not everything serves the Big Grand Plot, but it doesn't have to. This is something that's bugged me for a while, honestly, just wondering why some finales feel so empty to me... that is, when the show/book focuses very heavily on the big villain, with everything feeding into that "Bigger Plot," and it relentlessly builds up hype for this final showdown, and then it, well, happens. The big epic final battle happens. And then it's over. This could just be me, but that big epic battle just doesn't feel rewarding when that's EVERYTHING the plot leads towards, I think. It goes back to this very video about the feeling of emptiness in worlds. In my opinion, I think that feeling also exists when the characters you focus on don't have lives/purposes outside of the current plot. And yeah, you know, episodic storytelling could work for that, when the story you're telling fits with that. It's about making both the world and their lives feel dynamic and interesting, and making the whole story feel like an adventure in itself, rather than a means to an end.
@@TheRoseFrontier That is totally fair ! I think the best way to do it is something in the middle. A story with a big overarching plot, with some episodic shenanigans in the middle. And yeah the problem is a lot of people will see these episodes as "Filler" and tell people to skip them. A:TLA is a good comparison actually. I am not against skipping some episodes, but I'd say people should at least watch them all on their first watchthrough.
It's worth pointing out another genre where this shows up a lot. In a lot of post-cold-war espionage movies, most especially the Mission Impossible series, about 90% of the threats and villains are rogue members of the "good guy" espionage agencies, to the extent that you start to feel like whatever useful purpose these agencies serve is vastly outweighed by their capacity to churn out world-class villains.
Further exemplified in the latest Mission Impossible movie when the main character becomes a rogue agent himself after finding out the "good guy" organization is just as awful as the villains. Then that organization is pretty much a non factor for the rest of the movie, because they're incompetent as fuck without the main character on their side.
@@saucevc8353 Has the organization itself been much of a factor in most of the movies? I feel like usually they just have on "secretary" guy who exists to finger wag at Ethan for going rogue, and they exist to leave a bunch of gadgets in convenient staches.
One of the best things narrative wise (gameplay wise it gets old) in the Insomniac Spider-Man game is the random crime you can stumble across and stop. It shows that even though Peter has big issues he's dealing with, he still takes the time to help the little guys.
That's something I loved about those games. Other stories seem like they have a hard time integrating side quests in a way which is balanced with the main story. But I fully believe Spider Man would leave the food bank, have to save all the seagulls from a rogue chemical spill, then go punch Doc Oct all in one day.
I think the difference is that Tony becomes Iron Man in large part to address major threats (that he created), he didn't want to stop muggings and save cats from trees, he wanted to disarm terrorists, and in MCU Tony's case it's increasingly not so much about a desire to help people per se as it is a very elaborate, protracted penance for lives ruined. On the other hand, Clark got his start stopping muggings and saving cats, even when it was ambiguous whether Superman was the mask or the man, Clark was in it to help people, it feels less like "Well Darkseid is being chill this week and Luthor's on vacation, I'm bored so let's put the fear of God in some muggers" and more like "mostly I use my powers to scare off creeps and help Mrs Jenkins get her cat down, but you're saying that im uniquely qualified to take on this evil space dude?? Well, it would be irresponsible not to then, let's go" Basically, as I see it, Iron Man is constantly cleaning up his own mess and trying to atone and random relatively petty issues seem weird for him to address, other people's problems need to become big enough to become his before he'll lend a hand. Superman, on the other hand, always just wants to help people and if today that means getting a cat out of a tree and tomorrow getting the League together to deal with the impending alien invasion, well that's just how it goes and what matters is he can help.
Well, in Iron Man's case, there's the question of if flying a big robot suit to the scene is really the most energy efficient way of solving that problem.
I think it's because the Iron Man suit is really only worth using for more major threats, while Superman can just dial down his output a bit and take care of street-level issues just fine. Like, if Iron Man walked around doing low-grade work in that big suit of his, it's kind of a weird aesthetic because he'd be basically Robocop. Meanwhile, Superman could literally get a cat out of a tree while just walking around as Clark Kent.
I'd think that certain hero classes are involved. Like Thor or Superman is A or S tier class for big threats, while C or D is more The Question or Daredevil.
On a side note one of the things I love The Batman 2022 is they actually make Batman a good detective because he’s clever and not because he established a Batman surveillance state.
It also establishes that Batman is doing stuff besides chasing Riddler. He goes to see a previously-apprehended Joker, he's stopping muggings, he's doing all the stuff and then some dude decides to be a serial killer. He even asks "should I even exist? Am I why this happened?" And answer to both questions is yes.
He figures out the Riddler's plan due to the dumb luck of a cop that happens to be on the scene knowing about how carpets are installed. Pitch Meeting even makes fun of that.
it was amazing how revolutionary it felt when My Adventures with Superman had Clark clean up after a fight. like sure he couldn't repair absolutely everything that was broken, but he at least used his super speed and super strength to clean up lol.
@@Horatio787it says a lot when even the salamanders of 40k are more heroic than a mainstream version of Superman who’s entire point wasn’t just “but what if he’s evil”
There’s a Batman comic on webtoon, and I’m just remembering one chapter where Nightwing realizes Alfred is going to be alone for Thanksgiving, and he calls Jason Todd, who is in the middle of a firefight in the Amazon and is like, “you have three days to get back to Gotham. It’s for Alfred.” And Jason does exactly that! It’s clear he had other stuff going on, but he prioritizes Alfred over that stuff
In wayne family adventures. They dont have a problem per se with bats. They have daddy issues of course. But honestly reasonable. STILL MAD THAT THE VIXEN COMIC GOT THE BOOT BEFORE IT GOT TO EXPLORE SOME OF THE DEEPER AND MORE DAY TO DAY STUFF FOR HER.
The platonic and familial relationships in DC are really great when they're shown functioning well and not merely implied so that shallow audience heartbreak can occur when they're inevitably ripped apart. I specifically will forever be mad about the writers who ship Bruce Wayne/Barbra Gordon just to cause drama and complications. Even without the age gap it's so weird family and friend-dynamic wise and is the only part of the Animated universe that makes me recoil like I've bitten into a mouldy lemon.
That is my favorite episode in that whole series so far. Next favorite would be the one where Bruce needs to go to a party and explains to Alfred why he can't bring any of the kids (Dick shows off too much, Cassandra bails immediately, Damian is a violent gremlin etc.) And at the end he suggests "You could come with me Alfred" and he smirkingly responds "You don't pay me enough sir"
It's very clear in that webtoon that the batfam always has stuff to do and most of the time it is street level threats rather than constant super villains.
The “default opening conflict” often involves burning buildings or vehicle crashes for a reason. They’re morally uncomplicated, real-life scary and require heroic courage to save people from.
Patton Oswalt actually just came out with a comic based around this concept, but from the perspective of D-List Villains. It's called Minor Threats, and it's basically about street-level nobodies trying to eke out a living in a universe of the kind of impossibility that can only exist in a superhero universe. And this is all in the background as it basically retells the Joker's killing of Jason Todd, with them all struggling to survive as the rules of the game are changed FOREVER.
Super crooks on netflix is kinda like this, it technically takes place in the Jupiter rising universe but it straight does not matter. It's really good, basically a bunch of b list super criminals launch a heist against a major villain. It's great
I did feel the Civil War argument in the movies lost something when nobody pointed out 'hey, remember that time the World Security Council tried to nuke New York to deal with an already-mostly-defeated alien army?'
“Remember when Hydra used the US government surveillance on all Americans with a plan to make drone strikes across DC based on political leanings?” “Remember when this accord literally violates US law and imposes prison without trial?”
@@gianni206 what people find cool is subjective. Being edgy like Vegeta or uncaring like Batman might be cool to some, but in real life they would be the lamest people to be around with If Being a decent human being who cares about others and leads by example is "Boring", then i want to be the uncoolest dude ever.
It’s interesting to think about how in tokusatsu shows and tokusatsu-inspired magical girl anime, the hero retiring after defeating the main villain absolutely IS the default genre expectation. These heroes exist only to fight one specific villain in a world that is otherwise free of trouble, and when that is achieved at the end of the season, the hero has no need to be a hero anymore and will often explicitly lose their powers permanently. In the rare cases that a show is renewed for a second season (rather than being followed by a new installment in the same franchise, like Super Sentai and Pretty Cure is wont to do), the heroes usually need to be explicitly re-powered at the arrival of a new threat, because in between threats the audience DOES expect them to retire to mundane lives. In other words, the answer to the question “does the world still need Sailor Moon after the Dark Kingdom is defeated?” is explicitly NO.
And in these shows, it’s usually explicitly a personal journey for the characters, whereas any philosophical journey is secondary. So it makes sense that this cycle of empower and de-power of the cast is a full hero’s journey. Only taking home how the cast’s lives and relationships have changed amongst the mundane due to their experiences in the exciting parts.
And even with DragonBall Z, I really like how in between villain appearances, they show how the boys spend their peace time, just chilling eating good food and doing dad stuff while their wives have a science research job.
It's basically referencing Cincinattus. We idolize those who use power only to fix a problem, and are more than willing to go back to living a humble life once they are no longer needed.
@@samwallaceart288 Dragon Ball is a bit of a unique case, because the characters justify their own power. Goku isn't a superhero, he's a _martial artist_ . Yeah he rises up to the occasion when he needs to, but punching stuff and training to become stronger isn't just "what needs to be done", it's his hobby, his favorite thing to do, and his way of life in general. That does also put contrast between him/Vegeta/Piccolo/Tien who keep training all day erry day, and the others who found other callings and are usually seen pursuing them when the world isn't at stake.
Regarding Iron Man, Tony was perfectly aware that his weapons were killing people. He was fine with that. It wasn't until he saw that people other than *America* were getting easy access to his tools. "I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons that I created to defend them and protect them".
Yeah, basically. That was the point going back to Stan Lee's original creation of the character. He wanted to take someone modern audiences would hate, a war profiteer, and make him someone they could root for
I’d at least give them props for not stopping it there. He stops making weapons because of watching soldiers get killed right in front of him. He _becomes_ _Iron_ _Man_ because Yinsen’s village being attacked. And now he has a face to put to all the non-Americans that he himself put in harms way. And it finally hits home to him the extent of what he’s done.
To play devil's advocate a bit, Tony had an unconscious assumption that his weapons were being used by the US military only, which has a reputation, (true or false), of avoiding collateral damage. Seeing his weapons not only used against Americans but also but terrorists... was a huge wakeup call.
@@oktalley99To be fair, you can pick a year that the US is on the international stage and they probably have roughly the same relationship with the middle east.
These superhero based Detail Diatribes are really becoming my go to for affirming my childhood issues with superhero movies. It feels like every one brings up problems I called out when I was young and no one believed me.
One of the biggest ones fir me is MCU spiderman The kid really isn't very smart and feels like a sidekick to iron-man the entire time and people don't seem to notice how this Peter barely has any smarts when it matters or lacks conviction in being a hero. Also he's such a sick up to Tony it's embarrassing for someone that likes the older spidermans
@feritperliare2890 You're definitely not alone on that one. The MCU Spider-Man feels like a white washed Miles Morales, complete with his supporting cast and hero worship. The movies have their moments, but the character himself feels thrown together. I wish they had Tom Holland play Speedball instead. He would have fit into their world better and could have helped launch the newer generation of heroes easier by starting the New Warriors.
@@NegaHumanX I feel like you've got a point, but Marvel loves it's brand synergy, and to my knowledge, Speedball has been dead in the comics since the first Civil War. (I don't know if he's been revived since, so correct me if I'm wrong). Not to mention the fact that not many people outside of comic book readers know who he is. I didn't even know who he was until the first Civil War because I mainly read Avengers, Thor, and Iron Man.
@@nofacejames Sorry this reply got long.😅 I think it was definitely a recognizability/timing thing to rush Spider-Man into the MCU. But I think it was more to meet the fan demand and beat Batman v Superman then because they didn't think they'd be able to sell audiences on a new character. Pre-MCU, the average non-comic fan (maybe) knew Marvel had Spider-Man, Hulk, and the X-Men. We had the Blade/FF/Ghost Rider era movies, but a lot of people didn't even know which ones of them belonged to which company. I used to blow peoples minds by telling them Blade and Spidey lived in the same universe. Despite being important comic characters Cap, IM, and Thor were all barely known outside of people who saw those 90s Spider-Man cartoon episodes about Cap or the hated Iron Man cartoon. The vibe around them was very Aquaman-like and that's why the MCU was such a big thing. They took a risk on these underrated IP and it paid off. I remember everyone saying the Hulk was going to be the big seller and there was no way Cap could do well. Then Hulk ended up being the bottom of the barrel and Guardians of the flipping Galaxy, a group even my more geeky friends didn't know about, hit the top. So I don't think it would have been an issue to bring in a barely known like Speedball (especially since it was a vs movie between two of the characters the MCU made household names) but more like they wanted the Spidey fans to shut up about bringing him in and wanted to beat out Batman V Superman at the box office so they used him as bait. Speedball was presumed dead in the explosion in Civil War but survived. His family was harassed for it and he became Penance, coming back to his old identity after being edgy for a bit.
I literally learned about that deleted Avengers scene about Cap struggling with existing just last week and it pisses me off to no end that its not a part of the actual movie, its so good.
I think the thing to consider while watching this is that Red enjoys thinking about media theory for lack of a better term. So her critiques of the MCU may just be an expression of one way she seriously enjoys engaging with media. TLDR, she likes the MCU in a different that you do, and that’s not a bad thing.
I can’t believe criticism has become so demonized that people actually have to be told this and soothed by saying “don’t worry, this person still loves loves loves the thing they dare point out criticism with!!” in order to not hate it on sight. Media literacy really is dead.
Makes sense. I also tend to ruminate and overanalyze things I like or enjoy. I think it's also a matter of seeing and accepting flaws in stories one enjoys.
Whenever I write a Spider-Man story where the stakes get too high, I always give the same explanation: The Avengers are in space fighting a different Supervillain. Because I imagine everyone is just like “Yeah. That makes sense”
I remember a moment in Web of Shadows where that happens. Peter is on the phone trying to call people and one of the answering machine messages is something like “We’re sorry, Reed Richards can’t come to the phone right now as he is in another universe fighting an inter dimensional threat. Please leave a message after the beep.”
I never liked Spider-Man fighting too high stakes battles. My own personal thought on the MCU Spider-Man is that it would have been awesome if Spider-Man had been operating for years before the Avengers. Maybe 3-5 years. It would be amazingly interaction if during the invasion of New York, Spider-Man was focusing on saving people while the Avengers fought the threat. It would have been nice to see Spider-Man setting the difference of focus on rescue(which in Marvel is usually vigilantes Spider-Man, Ms.Marvel, Dare Devil) to fighting the big threats(superheroes in Marvel i.e. Captain America, Iron Man.)
@@macthemeh when they did something like that in EMH about the fantastic four during the new avengers episode. the rest of the team went to a space peace conference, but ben stayed because he wanted to watch the game
This is kind of what they did in the first Ant-Man; but instead if being too busy to 'come to the phone,' Hank Pim was holding a 30 year old grudge against a dead man.
@@melissaharris3389 I mean, considering tony's track record (especially with how ultron was most likely a recent event). HOWEVER, Endgame basically showed that, if Pym had swallowed his pride, and took a leap of faith, there is a chance he might have rescued Janet sooner if he had at least asked Tony. Given Tony understood the Pym particles enough to create time travel which probably explains why pym is seen attending his funeral, and why either him or hope are seen sharing the pym particles with others (like hawkeye)
Hey now, Batman doesn’t end The Dark Knight by retiring. He ends it by becoming a fugitive. The whole “he retired” thing isn’t mentioned until part 3, which *is* a weird decision but it isn’t a fault of part 2.
This! So much this. Batman retiring wasn't even a blip on my radar until Rises came along. The way Dark Knight ended, it always came off to me as "Batman's gonna keep doing what he's doing, it's just now people are going to be hunting and hating him (more than they already did, and this time for justifiable reasons)". It would have made Batman even more of an underground vigilante hero, which could have been AWESOME for a new movie! I will never understand a lot of the decisions they made for Rises, and making it so that Batman retired for 8 years is easily one of the biggest question marks.
Dark Knight does have Harvey mention that Batman can't hope to keep doing this forever - like how a lot of professional athletes retire when they're in their 30's.
@@AlphaoftheDeluge My guess is they had an idea for a third movie with the Joker returning as the villain and Batman fighting both the mob AND the police, but then Heath Ledger sadly passed away and that idea went down the toilet. So we got Dark Knight Rises instead.
Not to mention, it was explained explicitly in 'Dark Knight Rises' that Batman was ALLOWED to retire; the Dent Act nebulously enhanced the police force, providing them with the tools they needed to clean up the streets of Gotham. It doesn't mean crime has vanished - or that it didn't start to creep back in during Batman's retirement - just that the events of 'Dark Knight' and the apparent sacrifice of Batman's goodness changed Gotham in such a way that made Batman all but unnecessary.
I love how I’m both Civil war events, the near death of Spider-Man is treated as the “do you have any idea what the fuck your just did?” Moment, because no matter what side Spider-Man is on he is almost always the morally high ground of the team, and universally beloved by everyone so when one of the sides KILLS HIM, everyone is shaken to the core about how far this has gone
I think you missed an actual really great moment for Cap from Endgame. The support group he runs and when he tells Widow about the whales shows that when he isn’t needed for his strength and his shield, he is still helping however he can. There is plenty I don’t like about the MCU and Endgame in particular, but Captain America’s running theme throughout isn’t his powers, it’s his drive to help out whoever needs it in whatever way he can.
Yeah, that kept popping up in my head with the whole dissection of Captain America. In Endgame, his whole support group. He went out, and he became a therapist. He's helping people cope with their entire world vanishing overnight, a problem he's *uniquely* suited for. Like Red said, they're super heroes because they have the ability to fight a problem, and there's a problem for them to fight. Just because he's not wearing a costume, doesn't mean he stops being Captain America
I actually haven't seen "Endgame" (FAR behind on MCU), so take this with a grain of salt, but: I think it still fits Red's point, because running a support group isn't really a SUPERHERO thing. It shows that Steve is still a good guy who wants to help people, but he's doing what ANY good guy could. It drives in the fact that, when space gods aren't destroying the Earth, there somehow aren't any crimes or natural disasters for a super soldier to deal with.
@@joemerl1145 I think this is more a case of "MCU having a problem about having villains who do bad guy stuff for fun". For some reason, they kinda refuse to just have a generic villain just to punch. And when they don't kill the villain, they have them reform (Loki), or actually put in jail where they stay there and are no longer a menace. With Some exceptions like Kingpin I get they try to avoid the problem of comics of "no matter how many times they throw the villain in jail / they are killed, they get out / resurrect and come back to cause ruckus", and try to be "realistic" about it on how to deal with bad guys and problems like that (wipe them out entirely or rehabilitate them), but it becomes a problem, when you don't have at least other bad guys to replace the one you got rid of, contributing to the "empty world problem". She-Hulk somehow is one fo the few products to actually introduce a recurring bad guy (Titania), that doesn't suddenly turns good shortly after, or dies, but they kinda waste her bykeep portraying her for laughs only (and in fact, her sole existence basically undermines a lot of things the show try to do); and yet they still did the "introduce a villain to immediately rehabilitate them", in the form of one of the members of the wrecking crew: wrecker... AND In hindsight She-Hulk is an even bigger example of the "empty world problem", especially when you hear the show's title in spanish: she-hulk defender of heroes..... and she actually only defends 1 single "hero" (wong). and most of the people with powers that appear are normal civillians at best, jerks at worst, and the actual bad guys who want to be villains are just anticlimatically dealt with
@@joemerl1145but captain America is the only one that has had experience with his whole world mostly vanishing which makes him particuliarly suited to being a support group leader in that situation
Blue makes a fantastic point about how hard hitting it would be for a different Peter Parker to deliver the "With great power ..." line. And Red immediately skewers it even harder.
For the "Blade" point, I feel a need to acknowledge that Blade isn't actually the only guy who's aware of and/or doing anything about vampires in Marvel. A relatively recent Moon Knight story had Moon Knight going up against a vampire cult/pyramid scheme specifically because they decided to try something in New York, and Moon Knight, who is one of two priests of a god whose main task is protecting travelers at night, obviously had a problem with the idea of a bunch of predatory nocturnal magic people who prey on non-magic people moving into the town he calls home. That said, Blade is undoubtedly the best at killing vampires in the entire Marvel lineup. Moon Knight ends that storyline by effectively threatening Dracula, who had a guy infiltrate the cult, by basically saying "If you try anything here, I'm the first line of defense. I just took down an entire cult looking to make you irrelevant, so I'm willing to take my chances against you. And if I can't stop you, Blade definitely will."
Even in the blade comics he would occasionally run across other vampire hunters, some like night stalkers were halfway competent, and others were complete idiots that were only going to get themselves killed eventually.
Something that made Bionicle feel so special was it's focus on the mundane aspects of it's world. LEGO released Bionicle's first year of story through an online point and click adventure game where you played not as any of the heroes but a random villager occasionally getting a glimpse of the heroes as they were saving you and other villagers, even going so far as to point out that you have a habit of bumping into them while they're already dealing with another threat. Not many toys at that time came with toys for the heroes, villains AND bystanders to save, it's what made it feel so alive.
Looking forward to your thoughts on My Adventures with Superman. It really emphasizes Superman’s greatest strength is that he isn’t corrupted by his power (at least, this version) and also has lots of “help random people” montages. The villains are often treated as the thing keeping Clark from saving people, rather than the primary reason for the show. I’ve been loving it.
In most of the hero tests in My Hero Academia there were two parts: the "fighting villains" and the "rescue" parts, and then with the power trio training it was "Rescue" "Villains" and "Evacuation". Like "Villains" are just 1/3rd of what they do.
In my opinion, the deal with Captain America not wanting the supervision by the governments was not about "standing around and doing nothing". Its about not being a weapon to governments. His previous experience with HYDRA shows that mass surveillance, counter terrorism and all that was a weapon used to subjugate the world. If superheroes were under the government it would become a "Doctor Manhattan in Vietnam" situation all over again
That was my take on the conflict on Civil War as well. He knows the government isn't the best ones currently to decide what the Avengers respond to. They would just become the super powered enforcers of the world councils will, and Cap wasn't about that. Tbh I completely agreed with him, but I also am not a fan of authority, while also following the rules that makes sense lol
The fact that the entire thing was being pushed by the man responsible for most Hulk Incidents, was my biggest red flag. It was obvious that he only wanted his super soldiers, and if he couldn’t get an army of Hulks, then he’d get his own pet Avengers as attack dogs.
Winter Soldier showed him trying to do the government agent thing, but that government agency turned out to be basically controlled by Hydra, so of course he’s wary of doing that again.
I feel like the question left hanging is what would Captain America be doing if he didn’t have access to government or billionaire resources? Seems like all he does is paramilitary operations using expensive, high tech equipment with other military/billionaire employees.
You're spot on about movie 4 being waaaaay too late for Peter to get his motivation, however Uncle Ben's power-responsibility speech is not from the source material, it's a product of the Raimi movies. In the original comics, power-responsibility is given by the narration box, which years later will become Peter's inner monologue, making it a conclusion Peter comes to himself after Uncle Ben's death. The Raimi movies are heavily informed by the Ultimate comics, in which Uncle Ben does give half of the speech, but then several issues later, functionally the second half of it (sort of a contextualizing how-to) is given by J Jonah Jameson (you need to understand that Bendis is very pro journalists, so his version of Jonah has a deep sense of integrity, community responsibility, and is an objectively good human being.)
Incorrect. Attributing that to Uncle Ben goes back even further. Spider-Man the Animated Series (which aired it's last episode 4 years before the first Raimi film and 2 years before the release of Ultimate Spider-Man #1) has a scene with an alternate universe Uncle Ben trying to talk down an alternate reality Peter from destroying the multiverse by asking him what he always taught him, cue the line and that Peter committing suicide and the multiverse being saved. Heck, even without that the quote is expressly stated at the end if Spider-Man's first appearance in comics and, based on the ending of that story, one can naturally infer that the source of said quote was Uncle Ben.
@@sertorrhenclegane In the original comic Peter comes to that realization after Uncle Ben's death, WITH NO ONE to tell him that. He came it up himself.
@@acrsclspdrcls1365 Perhaps. But if one reads the words "at last aware..." you can extrapolate upon the idea that Peter had heard the phrase once (possibly many times) before and who would hear it from? His chief moral instructors, Uncle Ben and Aunt May. Uncle Ben's death gives the expression more pathos.
Which honestly hammers in just how weird a choice it was to kill off Aunt May just for that scene. The comics got by fine without it, its NOT necessary to Pete's character. They just wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
"Just doing what Superman would do." I love this line. It is exactly what Superman aims to achieve. In that way, it is stealth/one of the most heartwarming moments in comics for me. With six words, this child completely destroys Lex Luthor's belief that Superman, by existing and helping, handicaps and coddles humanity.
When Superman was dead for a while in the 90s, one of the stories was the Justice League being called together in mid-December because it turns out that Superman used to get mail from people with their Christmas wishes, and he'd go grant some of those wishes - so the entire League splits up and each goes out to fill in for Kal. Three points here: - It takes the entire League to fill in for Superman just in this one thing. - No-one knew about Superman doing this - the League only found out when the post office contacted them to ask about what to do with the mail. - Of course Kal took the time to play Santa.
That’s part of the reason I always swear the Kingdom Come is the best deconstruction, not Watchmen, and certainly not Injustice. Superman looses everything he cares about and still tries to uphold his values. He doesn’t loose faith in humanity until people are booing him for upholding justice, and praising Magog for straight up executing the joker on the steps of the court house. And even then Superman doesn’t go rogue, he just fucks off to the fortress of solitude for a few decades and this indirectly leads to the rest of the world becoming a much colder cynical place. The underlying theme of the entire story is that it’s important for society to have an infallible icon of virtue to aspire towards even if that icon is built upon a lie because without that hope and inspiration the only thing keeping up going is our bassist of impulses. There’s also a smaller meta narrative about heroes being a reflection of the society that birthed them.
It’s hilarious to me that MCU Spiderman and Netflix Daredevil live in the same universe, the same timeline, and the same New York, but have a completely different perspective on how frequent crime is in New York
34:00 The early seasons of Arrow really struck me as being "embarrassed to be a super hero show" particularly with the lengths it seemed to go to avoid calling Ollie "The Green Arrow"
A lot of Arrow, in hindsight as someone who used to watch it as it was coming out, was an attempt to make Green Arrow the CW’s Batman. They probably only cared about adapting the original Green Arrow comics enough to satiate Green Arrow fans by doing the bare minimum.
As the other commentator has said here, for the longest time they really wished WB would give them the OK for doing another Batman tv show. They never got it, so basically Arrow just did Batman stories with the arrow family.
@@RickReasonnzshit the main villian for half the dam thing was the league of assassin they even took the whole Raj wanting Bruce to be his replacement and shoved it onto Green arrow.
They didn't give him that title until season 4, if I recall correctly. They call him The Hood throughout season 1, and in seasons 2 and 3, his name is just The Arrow. When they finally start calling him Green Arrow, a character on the Flash even makes fun of it by saying adding a color is lame. This is only a small issue that speaks to a general distaste for Oliver being a superhero at all. In season 1, Oliver's modus operandi was murdering the rich people doing shady stuff his dad told him about. He's a serial killer who incidentally fights other criminals because they get in the way of his serial killing. They acknowledge this explicitly in season 2, where Oliver says his whole campaign in the first season was a fool's errand that didn't stop the bad guy and ended with his best friend being killed. Season 5 brings that back up again by making the central villain a guy looking for revenge against Oliver for murdering his dad in season 1. The series seemed aware that its main superhero wasn't doing much superheroing and tried to course correct for years without addressing the central issue that its superhero show didn't really want to be a superhero show.
@@ActuallySatan I have mixed feelings about the CW DC shows, like everyone else- but they could've at least called him the Green Arrow! I remember the Season 2 Arrow and Flash crossover felt awesome at first, but looking back on it, I was clearly just starved for superheroes at least acting like superheroes.
Worth noting that Neil Gaiman discusses the topic you mentioned, making worlds feel more real and populated, in his Master Class and it’s worth a listen. So often it feels like these CBM franchises are just very pretty facades on top of otherwise hollow and empty storefronts. Gaiman mentioned that even small details help alleviate this problem, giving the illusion of depth that answers people’s questions about the setting and raises newer, interesting questions that don’t necessarily need answering.
There is this MCU fanfiction that i love, and i have never been able to figure out why because it has nearly all the bad fanfiction tropes, but i think i see now that what it does have is stuff like the Avengers doing humanitarian aid after natural disasters and Captain America jogging through new York looking for muggers to stop and old ladies to help across the street.
It's important to note that, in Iron Man 3, Tony wasn't sitting on the couch drinking martinis. The whole point of that scene was that he wasn't. Pepper comes home to an Iron Man drone sitting on the couch, with Tony speaking through it, while the actual person is down in the basement working on more and more Iron Man stuff. His arc in that movie is grappling with his existential crisis, and reconciling his various goals (normal-ish life vs. saving/protecting the world) to varying degrees of success. That scene is right after he challenged the Ten Rings, and is right before they blow up his house. It could be read as Tony distancing himself from reality: the reality of his actions having consequences; the reality of his relationships needing real effort; the reality of his mortality, which he's forced to confront throughout; and the reality that his life has changed in ways beyond his control. Compare the scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming, in which Tony sends a drone to talk to Peter. That scene does have Tony at a party, and Peter is heavily discouraged when he realizes that. The drone is effectively a billion-dollar phone, albeit one that could've helped him in a fight (iirc it also saves him from a fall, so it's not like Tony did nothing for him; it's more that Peter's disappointed his mentor can't or won't give him the full attention and assistance he wants/needs). This scene also builds in the later scene where Peter yells at Tony for sending another drone, only for the latter to step out of the Iron Man suit and reveal he actually came this time. If his use of drones represents his separation from reality, or his attempts to distance himself from such, then the second scene shows how important Peter is (which is debatable, but the contrast between the two scenes certainly heightens the significance, if just slightly)
Yup. IM3 is all about how Tony had become *nothing but the suit* in an attempt to put armor on his emotions. It is a criticism of Red's entire take and she doesn't respond well because it's too sad for her fun cartoon shenanigans.
@@Duiker36 Not to mention Tony went through the other side of the wormhole (that's about to collapse) at a point in space billions of lightyears away from Earth and all life-sustaining functions in the suit are about to fail. Tony almost died. And if that's not enough, the idea of Thanos is planted into his head when he saw a glimpse of something bigger on the horizon that will come back. So yeah, Iron Man 3 is about Tony's PTSD and constant need to invent and create to save and protect everyone, and prepare for the oncoming threat. He comes up with 35+ suit models for various functions and situations but never perfects them because he's constantly moving onto the next idea. He inserts sensors into his body so he can a summon a suit immediately OR direct a suit to form around a loved one (and the suits' first directive is to protect a loved one because they're responding to Tony's nightmares!) Speaking of which, Tony isn't sleeping well because of his PTSD or not sleeping enough because he's busy inventing new suits.
@@Duiker36while I agree with some of their takes here, The one that seemed to go against what they usually want, which is a coherent story is, if Tony tries to find a solution for their to be a world that doesn’t need super heroes, and by the way, he nearly did, doesn’t that mean the world doesn’t need iron man in the normal sense? In fact, we see this in civil war, with how he plays a more behind the scenes role. He’s not out there fighting. And then this need to retire is shown in endgame, as even with the world in shambles, he doesn’t do much. But it’s only when he realises he should be turns back to being iron man, because iron man is for these things. It’s like how Spider-Man is for the friendly neighbourhood. They both have different goals in heroism. Like how cops don’t stop fires, but they do aid in preventing more people getting hurt by blocking of roads and redirecting. The fire is dealt by firefighters.
The Spiderverse films do a really good job of this too. They both have their big plots going on, but both films have the introduction montages where all the Spider-people say that they spend most of their time dealing with their friendly neighbourhood crime, but we also get little glimpses of Miles and the others just thwarting crime because that's what they do.
I think the thing with the whole power responsability thing in the MCU is that it represents a different lesson than it normally does. Because it normally means "if you have the power to do good, you can't look away, you can't let the bad things happen". But MCU's Peter already, knew that lesson from the beggining. But the lesson in NWH, is a different, maybe even more important one. "Even if you do good, bad things *will* happen, and you will suffer, and you will suffer losses. But you have to keep doing good. Because it's the right thing to do."
I dunno, it just feels like she should have done a different speech and give Peter issues with the latter throughout the MCU, allowing May to give him a speech that he can actually learn from.
Even when he steals Tony's tech, he never becomes "Iron Man" because he's under the impression that making the suit bigger, have more fire power, and...designed by someone else instead of doing it himself, makes him the "more advanced Iron Man in every way." Until Tony asks: "How'd you solve the icing problem?" Tony may be flawed but he always learns from his mistakes. You see it every film he's in. I have no doubt Obeidah, if he didn't die in the first film, would never learn.
@@Duiker36Thor only became a hero because Loki tricked him into fighting the Frost Giants and getting himself banished to Earth. Bruce Banner only created the Hulk after failing to receate the super soldier serum under orders of General Ross. Black Widow was literally created and trained by Ivan Dreykov. Hawkeye is the only one of the original Avengers to not have been created by a villain, because he has no villains.
First Hawkeye does not have a backstory. Second Hawkeye is inspired by first Hawkeye. This is because that show is legitimately about the chaos of multiple forces that for some reason center on a thing Kate holds and first Hawkeye for some reason.
This exact thing is part of why I enjoyed the new DnD movie so much; stuff is /happening/ all around them, we're just only focusing on them. Commerce is happening, conflicts over land are going on, Xenk is off being the paladin's paladin (except for a brief stint in our story), other adventuring parties are seen! Basically, the world feels full & alive and you can believe it exists & stuff is happening outside of the frame of the particular story we're currently following.
The MCU lives in a weird, uncharted limbo between the serializations of television and the definitive resolutions of motion pictures. I forgot who said it, but a TV show is a question (that is asked every week) and a movie is an answer (to a question that can usually only be asked once). Since the overarching story never really ends in comics, comic book movies always start off on the back foot.
It's interesting to me that the Japan of My Hero Academia is basically the system Tony Stark and Shield wanted in Civil War. The licensing, the regulations, the Public Safety Commission overseeing everything - it's a flawed system, of course, but Deku and company are growing up in the world the Pro-Reg side wanted to create.
In a lot of ways, MHA’s system is the logical consequence of blending the superhero genre with the Shonen Jump formula. Shonen manga almost always provides the heroes with a system to excel within rather than having them be fully self-motivated vigilantes like the superhero genre defaults to. You could probably extrapolate a lot about Japanese society, the parallels to the idol industry and the pro-establishment position of major publishers like Shueisha, but from a storytelling perspective, placing your heroes within a system does also provide a lot of tools for the writer. You can have clearly defined goals for the heroes (“I wanna be Hokage/The No. 1 Hero”), you can have a multitude of mentors within the system, you can have quantifiable power levels and advancements, you can have the all-important tournament arc, and you can have more powerful characters providing justified protection for the heroes while they are in the early phases of their development. Even One Piece, probably the most anti-establishment major shonen manga, does this in a roundabout way by making the antagonists provide that system
It's neat because Horikoshi obviously put thought into the setting. Supers have been around for IIRC like 200 years? There's no way that the world wouldn't have devised systems to deal with them. Registration being contentious is actually even a plot point in later seasons! He's obviously a huge fan of comics, and basically asked "What would Metropolis look like in 200 years?"
@@CanonessEllinorside note but this is even more interesting when fanfic of other media do general superhero aus, because they’re obviously influenced by mha but often in way that seems purely unconscious. Combine that with classic mcu fics like the “everyone hanging out in avengers tower” and you get the funniest sub genres of “heros all live in a tower and their powers are ranked and regulated” and then you get people writing “yeah and that system is bad” aus in response. It’s honestly fascinating how superhero aus become their own weird thing with their own tropes that don’t fit traditional western superhero tropes well, mostly I think because of young people who have been so influence by the mcu and shonen superhero stuff that they don’t have media where superheroes are being classically friendly neighbourhood to reference. It creates some super funny holes in the worldbuilding too (who cares about that stuff in fanfic but from an analysis level it’s certainly interesting). Like the death of origin stories means the charcaters in these aus are seemingly born with their powers too.
@@CanonessEllinor Don't forget having an established system also means you can have a sort of norm for heroes, meaning you can have the "this is a standard situation you'll face in your career, if you can't handle this I'm sorry but this job just isn't for you" situations at the start with the "Oh shit this situation effectively breaks our system, uhhhhhhhhhh, good luck" ones near the end which can be really good for a linear story, if a bit incongruous with traditional western superhero media. Plus it means that you can have your supes have designated days off where they don't need to angst as much about taking care of their personal life for once because they aren't the literal only one in between regular people and catastrophe most days of the week, and I think its always nice to see doing heroic things not ruin people's lives.
Japanese manga and anime approaches it better than Marvel did with Civil War. Americans just believe it's about selling out to the Man and endangering the ones you love.
25:00 This is touched on in an episode of Batman: TAS - S2E3, District Attorney Janet van Dorn is kidnapped by Batman's rouges gallery and forced to defend a captured Batman in a kangaroo trial. As a result of the chaotic proceedings, Janet declares in summation that Batman was the response to the villain's existence - "If anything, YOU created HIM!"
I love how many versions of batman touch on this. Including the 2022 version where he realizes it's not enough to just beat up the bad guys and call it a night, (cause that's how psychos like the riddler get the wrong idea) He has to be a symbol of hope for people. Whereas in the animated series Janet lays it out plain and simple: "sure the gimmicks may be different, but even without batman you would all be out there- one way or another- bringing misery to Gotham". She calls it like it is, that everyone in Arkham would have snapped at one point or another.
I was thinking about the Batman the Animated Series while watching this too! I always enjoyed how Bruce Wayne worked to better Gotham in multiple ways, many of his early episodes were about helping charities and the disadvantaged.
Actually the Shadow began in pulp magazines. The radio adaptations came later and shrunk the Shadow’s multiple identities to one, gave that identity a girlfriend, and made him considerably less bloodthirsty. It was the radio show as well that gave him the “power to cloud men’s mind” not a power he had in the literary incarnation.
So the Shadow wasn't just the inspiration for Batman (alongside Zorro). But he was also basically a proto-Moon Knight. The OG version sounds so much cooler than the Alec Baldwin flick 😂.
I interpret Aunt May giving the speech a bit differently. May was dieing from Peter trying to save people. She knows how Peter will take this and wants to avert some of that pain by affirming that this was the right thing to do. Even with this outcome, May still thinks they should have done it.
On first viewing, I assumed that she said it as a reminder of Ben's words and why Peter's doing any of this. Kinda agree that it would've hit harder from the other 2 spidermen though
I think "My Adventures with Superman" is actually starting this out pretty OK, spoilers for those who didn't watch yet. But the first episode is about Clark Kent trying to be "normal" as in not using the powers he knows he has so far. He messes up, breaks his alarm trying to hit snooze, on his way to his internship at the Daily Planet, he rescues a cat from a tree, and then just mutters that he HAD to do that, what else could he do? This is a guy who isn't setting out to be a hero, but becomes one due to how he is, whether nature or nurture. He's the guy who rescues kittens without a second thought and only then tries to justify it to himself. Like he can't help helping people. And once he dons the suit, he just accepts that this is his role.
I couldn't get past episode 6 of MAWS because of how badly Lois gets butchered. It's like a trend in media these days for someone to do completely horrific, out of pocket shit, and yet it's the other person who ends up having to apologize. Not them. It was most egregious in the Barbie movie, but in MAWS Lois has her own version of it where the conflict is just brushed under the rug and everyone's happy... but she never said the word "sorry" even once. It's like with Ken, how it seems eerily apparent the writers don't think either of them did anything that warrants an apology-which is so delusional it's scary. At least with the Barbie movie them not writing in a Ken apology is blatant misogyny! What was going on with MAWS? There's no such convenient explanation for completely toxic writing.
@@MrDeathmaster131 Oh noooooo, I feel so insulteddddd, whatever will I dooooo. How could I _possibly_ allow you to think that I care about toxic relationship dynamics (platonic and otherwise) being treated like they’re wholesome and totally fine in pop culture? How could I let you think that I think SAYING SORRY is a necessary part of conflict resolution? I’m such a pansy snowflake for thinking people should apologize to each other, I’m soooooo ashameddddd.
@@baydiacHate to break it to you, but getting a blatant sorry out of Lois that's also not partially fueled by in-moment worry *is* what would be out of character for Lois, based on how she's been characterized for decades. Her whole personality when it comes to her choices essentially is "no need to ask for permission or forgiveness, because doing either isn't gonna stop the thing from getting done". And yeah, she will occasionally admit when she's been wrong or unfair, but it's also again on occasion and mostly when she's been blatantly in the wrong. Also, just because we didn't see it doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen. Things don't explicitly have to happen onscreen for them to have taken place, and it's pretty functionally implied that apologies and relationship patching already happened off-acreen by the next episode, when they're not dealing with the initial ball of emotions of their arguments or adrenaline rush of almost dying a little bit before. Just because that's not how you would have written the Lois of the story, doesn't mean Lois is broken from how she's always foundationally been.
_Lost Boys_ is a classic that introduces the worldwide vampire problem and the grandpa's reason for being the secret protagonist _in the last line of dialogue._
I'm picturing him as a not-so-supervillain punching the clock for a desk job in a cubicle to collate lists of IP's & email addresses for their corporate overlord.
@@dracos24 I could see it as a gag where he's fighting actual modern day pirates and is explaining his oath, and someone goes "Oh, like people torrenting movies?" And he just goes 🤨"...no? I mean people who attack ships at sea, kill the people on board and steal their stuff."
@@snorpenbass4196There are actually plenty of refugees he could rescue on the seas that come under attack by pirates in the modern day, so the oath holds. He just needs to reinforce the purple condom suit against sub-machine guns and assault rifles.
of course, that same panel establishes he crusades against *greed*, and uh...not a lack of targets to hit there. a modern-day Phantom could basically be Eliot Spencer, whether on his own or as part of a whole Leverage crew made up entirely of early superheroes.
The Discworld series is very good at making it clear that characters that are not the protagonist of the book you are currently reading do have their own interesting and meaningful lives.
The City Watch books also always have the members of the Watch DOING things - ensuring crimes get dealt with, public service, helping the citizens… in no small part because each book also shows the Watch evolving, by hiring more Watchmen, or establishing new departments, or cleaning up new issues that started between Anhk-Morphork and others cities.
1:17:40 The fact the idea of canon events as a hinderance to modern superhero movies comes up in this conversation honestly made me appreciate Spiderverse even more
As much as the Aunt May death scene is weird within No Way Home itself, I think it inadvertently helped set the stage for AtSV. That scene does give the feeling that a canon event is being enforced even when it doesn’t need to be, and the weird feeling paved the way for a feeling of “no that’s bullshit” when Miles can’t save his dad
@@stwbmc98 I disagree that it was just a checklist item. The point of the story was to have his heroic life start having real, lasting consequences on his status quo. A loved one dying from it was the natural conclusion of that point, and it set the stage for a crucial conflict for a hero: it's easy for a hero to do "heroic" stuff when it's what they want to do, but how do they cope when their heroic principles tell them one thing when they really personally want to do something else, typically something very "unheroic"?
Superman's day off helps show something I love about superheroes, and is an excellent illustration of what MJ meant in her "anyone can wear the mask" speech.
I do like Vison's statement that "Their [the various MCU supers] very existence invites challenge." I think what people miss is it is that selfsame challenge that invited the heroes too. So yeah, while a super's existence might invite challenge, their absence would not remove the challenge.
Vision's statement and reasoning doesn't take into account that the sequence of events that led to the creation of the Avengers was begun a thousand years ago when Odin left the Tesseract/space stone on a earth for 'safe keeping'. It's finding the Tesseract that allows HYDRA to create the weapons that necessitate Progect Rebirth and the creation of Super Soilders. The Tesseract is what brought Mar'vel and the Skrulls to Earth; Carol Danvers getting her powers and Nick Fury beginning the Avengers Initiative. The chain of events culminats with Thanos sending Loki to Earth and the battle of New York. Iron Man was the first MCU film released, but Tony announcing himself as Iron Man did NOT begin the chain of events. Odin deciding to bury an Infinity stone in his 'backyard' is what started the snowball rolling. Everything is either a direct consequence if the Tesseract being on Earth or pre-dated Tony developing the Iron Man armor. Anton Venko: pissed at Tony's dad. Eldrich Killian and AIM? Pissed at Tony from pre-Iron Man douchebaggery. SHIELD was HYDRAs beard before Tony was born. Accidently create a murderous AI? Result of messing with space rock/Infinity stone brought to Earth by Loki while attempting to get another infinity stone.
Once again, I feel like both of the Spiderverse movies are able to avoid this problem with superhero stories. Even though Miles is figuring things out, it's clear that the world around him needs a Spiderman and someone has to step up. Then the second movie shows us that every world that exists will always need a Spiderman
It’s fascinating that JJBA effectively fixes this by involving destiny and a rotating cast. Good guys exist to beat bad guys and don’t need to be superheros once they have won.
And when a JoJo shows up later, often they clearly haven't gone from strength to strength. Jotaro turns out to be a pretty crummy dad, Joseph just really goes downhill as he ages - it's sad, but it does feel very real. It's not just "Oh you used to do the cool thing where you guess people's next line, that makes you a superhero forever"
@loadeddice4696 After part 3, Jotaro literally doesn't use Time Stop at all until part 4. He's just vibing with his family. Not, you know, WELL but he's sure with his family.
And also, the villains that exist are characters that can only be handled by people with JoJo skill sets and abilities, or (as the case in part 3) the VILLAIN makes the heroes
the thing is, they're not heroes necessarily Maybe you could call Jonathan one, he's there because of vampire threat. but Dio essentially makes him Joseph... his godfather gets kidnapped and vampires attack him, otherwise he's not exactly heroing Jotaro's initial motive is to save his mom and that's all, eventually he does start working with speedwagon because he *knows* Dio is still a threat even after death. Dio also essentially creates Jotaro but then part 4: high schoolers dealing with a serial killer... part 5: a literal crimelord, gangsta part 6: Jolyne's motive is to get free then save her father
I'm glad Aquaman was considered a good example here because he was saving people and dealing with a real problem outside of himself, there just weren't as many humans involved as you usually expect. Those freaky crab people at the bottom of the ocean needed a hero, and Aquaman was there to save the day.
I love that you have figured this out. It's mind-blowing that these worlds have built franchises and yet the world building is lacking a human care. That's the thinking that will keep us human writers prevalent when AI takes over
The out-of-character-ness of Civil War was so reviled that Tony Stark spent YEARS getting the stuffing knocked out of him by every other writer in every other series to pay for his sins.
I wanted to mention a chapter of the batfam webtoon (it's really good go read it). Upon learning that Alfred is alone for the holidays, the entire batfam goes "shit, ok I'll try to finish this and get back asap". It's so heartwarming!
One thing that came to mind (which you guys pretty much say) is the difference between ongoing problems and immediate problems. Of all places, I saw this dichotomy in the Fate Core Rulebook. Ongoing problems are things the heroes need to fix (or continually work to fix) where immediate problems are usually threats that the heroes need to stop on a time limit. The former makes the hero the active party, where the latter makes the hero the reactive (or even passive) party.
When it comes to Spiderman in the MCU, I stand by a theory that Uncle Ben wasn't impactful for Peter like the other movies. His inciting event to become a superhero was that he lives in a world with superheroes. Then he finds that responsibility in the Uncle Ben moment of No Way Home.
Yep. AFAIK they don't say exactly when Uncle Ben dies, but it had to have been fairly recent to Homecoming as Pete implies May is still grieving to some degree. But notice he talks about how much SHE's gone through, and not really including himself in that. In the MCU Pete gets his powers at 14. His talk with Tony about having to act because he can always struck me as the precursor to the Great Power line. It's the still-fuzzy thought you have in your head that crystallizes when some one sums it up perfectly. There is literally no way he learned the Great Power line before his talk with Tony. If he had that's what he would have said.
Literally the two reasons Superheroes can ARGUABLY be summarized in the iconic Spiderman quote. With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility. Unless the premise of a film or piece is simply "The world is average but this random guy got super powers" (which if written well could prove quite a comedy), then why would someone acquire superpowers if there is no need for it? Also, regarding the "Retiring Superheroes" thing. I think it at least worked in Endgame as Steve gave the Shield to Sam, and didnt just leave the mantle hanging. He had been through a LOT, and had a chance to get his happy ending with Peggy AND not leave his role as Captain America, to rot. As opposed to other cases where the hero retires but nobody inherits the role.
There's kinda elements of that in Shazam, where Billy gets superpowers but all he can do with them is charge people's phones. But I'd absolutely enjoy a full story about a superhero who just doesn't have a supervillain and never encounters any crimes he's able to solve.
I prefer the Dreadnought approach to that thing, in Dreadnought, a novel about a trans superhero, there's tons of people with powers in the town, but only a handful of superheroes. And when Dreadnought, who's just starting the business asks why, one of the superheroes describe to her how horrible the life of superhero can be, they can put their family in danger, they'll have no respite, etc... In the end, if people want to do good, they become firefighters or policemen, or, as most do, they just live normal life, and do good sometimes. But only true heroes would try to live like superheroesd risk their lives and mental health at this point...
This is honestly a lot of what makes JoJo Part 2-4 entertaining to me. The world is normal outside of the secret bullshit being experienced by the characters. Part 4 does it the best, where it’s a normal town with normal town problems, there’s just some crazy people granting superpower ghosts because a couple of bored young men said fuck it, let’s just shoot things with a magic arrow, surely nothing will go wrong.
Additional note on the Civil War event- while it was going on, the cosmic/space character were busy dealing with their OWN massive crossover event called Annihilation. Absolutely spectacular series that I would recommend checking out, mostly categorized by significantly less big dumb idiot moments, and significantly more big giant alien moments.
The sherlock Holmes fans fixating on Moriarty and Adler is interesting. Because it contrasts with my experiences. I'd only ever read the original stories and when BBC sherlock came out I 100% thought they were new characters invented for the show. I'd literally forgotten they existed at all.
Further note on the Civil War in the MCU. There is very little coverage of how the general population reacts to the Sokovia Accords. We get one girl talking shit to Tony and a lot of police after Bucky, but we dont see what the population thinks of the Avengers. It adds to the feeling like the world is just as big as that parking lot. No civilians, no crime, just action figures smacking into each other.
At this point, absolutely all of my knowledge of comics come from this channel (Never really watched or read them). How passionately you both talk about it makes it sound really great, so much that I watch your videos about it when it couldn't be farther from what I usually read/watch
Getting to the No Way Home diatribe, I liked the other spider-men sort of laying it out that the life of the spider man is one of sacrifice. Toby is older and has learned the hard lessons. Andrew paid the price big time with the death of Gwen Stacey. Tom...hasn't really done that. He's faced world ending threats, but they weren't personal. He's faced local and deadly threats, but it hadn't come for his home...yet. No Way Home lays out that he's not Stark. He doesn't have vast resources to protect his personal life (not that this even protects Stark all that much). The stuff he does leads to danger for those around him. So in the end he becomes the local web head dealing with street-level crime, with no backing, and no one to lean on as Peter. Of all the Avengers, he doesn't have anything outside the job.
To be fair, Tony was the biggest prevention of Tony's resources protecting his personal life; "Hey dumbasses, here's my home address, come and get me" is not gonna make his security's job easier. (Also, he didn't think to install any defensive systems in his house that didn't require putting them on? Such a Sooooper Genius.)
It's a shame you don't mention the x-men movies, because they're pretty good at showing that "the world is the problem, they're struggling to live" they're not perfect movies, but the world is far from empty, it's actively and openly hostile to the heroes.
In The Batman, I loved the way that they showed the different methods he used to get into the night club in order to highlight the theme. The first time, he's vengeance Batman only. The second time, he's Bruce Wayne only. The third time he's both. I love the journey of self integration.
For me, No Way Home doing the Great Power/Responsibility speech with Aunt May recontextualized this version of Peter Parker as one who would have been a hero even if Ben didn't die. I know that sounds ridiculous because Peter is a good hearted person and would always want to help people, but I feel it important to note that he typically goes to stop crime for the FIRST time BECAUSE of revenge and stopping/killing the guy who killed Ben. Especially when the Remi and TASM spiderman have different levels of that where Remi KILLS the guy(and then has to have Aunt May explain why thats not good) and TASM realizes the importance to save civilians before he ever finds the crook. So to me, MCU Peter is the end of the spectrum of having NO motivation for revenge when originally becoming Spiderman. And it makes sense that HIS lesson of power and responsibility is actually about if its: "not my r e s p o n s i b i l i t y to save the villains"
Originally Peter started as a selfish red pilled incel. His motivation was guilt but doing the right thing and interacting with other people eventually made him a better person.
As @dradencake3199 said: MCU Peter Parker is more intrinsically altruistic. He starts being Spider-Man because he got super powers and feels that's his responsibility to help others; because, he can. This is what he tells Tony Stark in Civil War. Making him the ultimate Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. It's only after Stark gets him involved with Avengers stuff thar Peter feels/thinks he should do even more and runs afowl of The Vulture.
And unfortunately is the only female character that is a client. Irene Adler is amazing but so many studios only see the chance to make a love interest to Sherlock
1:22:20 This comic honestly does such an amazing job of making the reader feel exactly what it should, what superman feels for humanity, HOPE. It makes you feel like the world CAN succeed without Superman, but right now it just needs his example more than anything, they just don't know it yet.
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
![ลองสุ่มไอโฟน 990 โกงมั้ย? [ โกงมั้ยครับ ep.101 ] | DOM](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bfsWe0j492k/mqdefault.jpg)
1:22:56 Superman holding up the sky is also another example of him helping people; not just because he’s keeping the sky from crushing the Earth, but because Atlas wanted to be free of his burden specifically so he could go to his daughter’s wedding. When he comes back at the end of the issue, he thanks Superman for giving him the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle and see how shocked Zeus was at someone being willing to take the weight from Atlas’ shoulders. It’s honestly such a good comic, I love it.
And that it’s intercut with ordinary people questioning where Superman is, and other heroes stepping up to fill in the gaps. Because Supes handles so much all the time that people on street-level notice his absence! And because the other heroes aren’t rendered redundant by Superman’s existence, trust even if he vanishes it must be for good reasons, and hey, after all the times Superman’s helped all of us it’s the least we can do to pick up the slack when he’s busy somewhere else! Clark even trusts the other heroes enough to lay down & catch his breath after Atlas takes the sky back (because he *can* carry the weight of the world on his own, but not for long, and even Superman needs help!) Hell, even that Atlas *comes back* at the end, because Superman did him a great kindness and he won’t leave someone who did that for him to carry his burden alone!
What goes around comes around, and kindness begets kindness! People with the power to help others should, and these people do! And that makes other people want to be better by extension! Which makes us, the readers, want to be better, pass on those small kindnesses we can and make the world better in our own way!
Peak! Superhero! Storytelling!
This is super wholesome. Holy shit
Am I seeing things, or is Superman pictured off-panel at the bottom of each page, 'holding up the world?'
@@positivelink6961 That whole series is full of brilliance; most of the digital comics that came out that year from DC were quite well done in general.
Not seeing things. Thats exactly what is happening. @@Kartissa
One superhero moment that always stood out to me was from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, where we see Peter save a kid from bullies. He doesn’t just chase the bullies off and call it good, he fixes up the kid’s science project, hypes up how cool said project is, and then walks the kid home. 10/10 that is a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
I really like the amazing movies for showing how much ordinary crime spiderman stops and helps others out
And the fact that Amazing Spider-Man is actually still doing that kind of work during No Way Home is actually pretty damn amazing, because even in his darker hours, he's still trying to be there for his neighborhood.
I am so glad people are coming around on the Amazing Spider-Man movies. There was so long there where they only ever came up in a derogatory context, and as someone who always liked those movies it felt not good to want to talk about their positives but know if I brought them up, I’d have to deal with the avalanche of negativity that came if you dared to bring them up in a positive context.
Like, sure, they have problems, but there’s so much those movies did *right,* and it makes me happy to see them get the appreciation they deserve.
@@msf2399To be fair, the second movie is legitimately awful with only the minorest of positives. The first movie was definitely just overhated because it wasn’t a 4th Tobey movie, and people have gotten over that now.
@@msf2399, Amazing 1 has my favorite Stan Lee cameo. Garfield was a great, just very different, Spider-Man
The wild thing about MCU Spider-Man is that Daredevil and Kingpin exist like a mile away from him, but Disney doesn't want to acknowledge anything from the Netflix shows.
Marvel doesn’t want to acknowledge that any of their shows exist for some reason. I can take the shit with mutants and all that but there’s no reason something like the Runaways or AOS shouldn’t be canon.
To be fair, Kingpin was the main villain of the Hawkeye show.
Spiderman has so much solo/rogue potential I would prefer him to star in daredevil’s movie rather than the other way around.
Matt Murdock shows up in the most recent movie No Way Home. Which is a very cool scene imo. But I get your point. It just seems like maybe it's not as hard for them to miss each other in a city full of people and shit going down. Luke Cage is probably sleeping off a night of beating down a whole building of armed dudes. It's impossible for them to be everywhere, and it would make the world feel a lot smaller in fact. Like "Oh, yeah, there's Jones, my favourite drinking buddy, and that guy, and also that guy AND THAT GUY..."
They're all busy people.
And there's only so much scope a plot can take before causality starts getting messy.
IT WAS THE SQUIRREL!!!
The reason being that the tv series were legally severed from the MCU with an orbital laser strike to limit how much damage Perlmutter could do. He's since been handled, so the old tv stuff is being reincorporated where it's good, popular, makes at least some sense, etc.
One "busy superhero world" that came to my mind during the later part of the video was the prologue for The Incredibles. On the drive to his wedding, Bob breaks up an armed chase, saves a cat from a tree, combats a supervillain, stops a runaway train, apprehends a thief and bumps into two other superheroes on the way. And the entire time he was insisting that he wouldn't be late to the wedding, which he almost was.
It's only like the first ten minutes of the movie, but it gives an amazing picture of what a world thriving with superheroes looks like.
Three superheroes, if you count Buddy trying to be Incredi-boy. Which, you should. But that you can NOT think that speaks to the biggest weakness of The Incredibles. "Gadget using badass normals = always bad. Innate superpowers = always good." Yeeeeeeeah. Did no one at Pixar go "Wait, The Screenslaver? Is this your THIRD straight tech based supervillain, Brad? Why not have one with actual superpowers for once?"
@@Volvagia1927technically the underminer does have powers but they're not really shown in the movies, he has enhances strength, senses, resilience etc but since its not shown it doesn't really matter to the audience, in which case it should be 4 non-powered tech villains, bomb voyage with his bombs, syndrome, underminer with drills vacuum gauntlets etc, and screen slaver.
@@Volvagia1927OTOH maybe, given the real world problem with exploitation of tech for de facto supervillainous ends (surveillance, estrgenous plastics, forever chemicals) it's not bad to plant the idea that tech-without-morals is a dark road.
@@Volvagia1927 I think that particular distinction we see a lot in superhero media, stems from the idea that tech is something you need to afford, whereas innate powers is something anyone can have. It's essentially a battle between privilege and talent
And prevents a person from committing suicide. You forgot to mention that one, probably because it isn't on the same threat level as the other things he faces throughout the movie, though I'd argue that neither is the cat on a tree part.
Hey Red, there's an episode of Batman the Animated Series called "Trial" hat actually addresses the problem. A DA goes on the news saying that Batman is responsible for his Rogues Gallery. In response, the villains kidnap her and Batman and put them on trial where the DA cross examines all of the villains who blame Batman for their misdeeds. She eventually comes to the conclusion that the villains would have existed even without Batman. That even if they may have been lacking the supervillain gimmicks they would still be ruining the lives of Gotham citizens. In short, they created Batman.
which episode is that? Would love to watch it
@@V_Wibbeke "Trial"
Such a great episode. I love the idea that while Batman does make some villains more super in response to him, he doesn’t create more villains.
What's even better? A fan had the idea that Batman, while at trial, would have asked to choose his own council... and named Harvey Dent. Two-Face would serve as both prosecution and defense, because 'Judge' Joker thought it'd be funny, and I can only imagine Harvey Dent eviscerating all the excuses the villains made.
@@V_Wibbeke Season 2 Episode 9 "Trial" of Batman: The Animated Series
One of my favorite parts of Across the Spider-verse was that the various Spider-people are always, *constantly* saving people. From disasters, from petty crims, from villains, they are constantly helping people because every world *needs* a Spiderman.
I think the main issue with modern superhero adaptations is that _classic_ superheroes were folk heroes, stories told to inspire people so we could imagine a world where good people stopped bad things from happening. Whereas modern superheroes are **celebrities,** and even Hollywood can't quite figure out how to pretend that celebrities have to exist.
I've been growing suspicious that Hollywood really doesn't *want* celebrities anymore, because celebrities have opinions and make mistakes and stuff. Hence the push to AI and hence the SAG strike. They don't want people. They want masks. They want lucrative IPs that work regardless of who the faces are.
realizing this is what helped me understand why I 'didn't like' superman. The superman stuff I saw growing up completely missed the point of superman.
This is extremely well put and is also (sorry Red) (and everyone else who loves this show) why I actually really can't stand My Hero Academia. "Superheroes as super-celebrities" feels like such an inherently awful premise for a story to me, no matter how much actual heroism you tack on to it.
@@sabertoothkimThe premise of MHA is that 80% of the populace has superpowers, and the whole celebrity angle has been called out as one of the flaws of MHA's hero culture.
Heck, many Heroes resigned after the first War arc BECAUSE they couldn't take the criticism and scrutiny. One in particular admits in his thoughts that all he wanted was fame and adulation while he publicly retired. He was the 9th-ranked Hero.
The other implied angle of the "celebrity hero" is that just Hero work isn't enough to pay the bills, for some. Because in MHA, Hero is an actual job due to Quirk ubiquity, not something only a select few can do.
@@sabertoothkim It's not something that every character, hero or villain, agrees is the best thing ever. It's more like it's one of the themes of the show. One of the earlier villains, Stain, calls out false heroes for only being after fame and glory, and its not something that the heroes shrug off as him just being crazy and evil. They can't side with him because he was killing heroes in his quest to rid the world of the 'false' ones, but he gives the main cast something to think about.
My Dad was an extra in the original Avengers movie and was in that deleted Captain America scene. We never ended up seeing the scene and thought it was just lost to history. When I saw you post a clip of that scene in the podcast it made me realize that it ended up out there as a bonus feature on the Blu-Ray, so I went and found the clip, and my Dad was right front-and-center at the 1:49 mark. My Dad happened to call me and I told him, "You'll never guess what I'm watching right now."
It made both of us very excited and happy, so thank you. You helped make my Dad and I very happy today. I've appreciated your content for years as a lover of history and storytelling, but you added a very personal touch to my Dad completely inadvertently, and I thought I would let you know. It's wild how something as simple as a podcast just chatting about superhero movies in a loose and fun manner can help make a father and son smile, but your podcast ended up doing that. It was real touching and sweet. Thanks for that.
I'm glad that you got to see it!
@@sebastianevangelista4921 Thank you!
Thanks for sharing. Very cute story.
It's awesome when something in your own personal life happens to be directly referenced by something else completely unrelated. Especially when that thing is already obscure, even relative to your own life.
It is pretty cool to see someone you know/love "on screen"; had a friend who was an extra in Entourage, and I had tried a few times to find the episode she talked about (I knew it was in the 3rd season; not a fan of that show, so wasn't something I'd come across). But was randomly wanting a "Honest Trailer" for Entourage and holy crapballs...!
(FYI, I would suggest backing up that extra/cut clip with your digital collection of family photos/videos; if the physical disc gets lost in the move, tis good to have the bases covered.)
Part of what makes One Punch Man such a brilliant superhero satire is that it explicitly confronts the issue of “why do superheroes need to exist?” Not in the sense that there aren’t reasons for heroes to exist in-universe, but Saitama’s core conflict is the ennui that results from handling every confrontation without the slightest effort, thus robbing him of the emotional impact of crimefighting. The story purposefully takes the subtextual problem of “emptiness” you’re speaking about and makes it part of the text.
This discussion made me think of something...
So, I'm an English Lit graduate, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how stories age.
I have a concept I call "Generic recursion". The theory, briefly put, is that stories first get popular because they capture the zeitgeist, they say something about the world that resonates with the audience and hooks people in. Then, as the years go by and the story ages, it builds up more internal history and lore, and gradually it becomes less and less about the zeitgeist and more about building on its own internal continuity. Until finally it doesn't say anything about the outside world but only comments on itself.
Superman first appears in the Great Depression and deals with Great Depression-type stories, and then WW2-type stories. Big current events that weighed heavily on entire societies. But by now Superman-stories are about... well, about being Superman-stories, and what it means to be a Superman story. About being a world filled with superpowered beings and what that means for the superpowered beings in that world.
Along the way, any connection to real life has been lost. And it grows less welcoming to new audiences, as it doubles down on appealing to the audiences who are steeped in the genre's history and demand expansive continuity geekery to make it all feel worthwhile. It has gone from something popular that commented on the zeitgeist to something insular that only looks inwards.
That's actually the case for movements, institutions, etc., too.
They start out focused on changing the world or accomplishing something or whatnot. Then, they eventually become established, and the focus on trying to maintain themselves eventually overtakes the mission itself.
Not to say that all people will become what they're fighting against, but that it's a natural cycle.
@@EthanKironus8067 Yeah pretty much sums up a lot of tension in my part of the world now.
I've had a nearly identical thought but about star wars. The original trilogy mixed western and sci-fi and East Asian elements. It also featured an unambiguously good fight right to contrast America's embarrassment over Vietnam. Not to mention the complete lack of any other movies quite like it. But the Prequels and sequels got so obsessed with the lore and deliberating over the themes of the original that general audiences completely lost interest. Season one of the Mandalorian was such a big hit because it wasn't about star wars, it just sorta took place in star wars. It was a western with a star wars coat of paint. I feel very similarly about Andor but it isn't anywhere near as popular.
Google Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.
@@izzy1349 Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, the entire western genre, the list goes on.
An example I think about a lot is the Prime Directive: originally a piece of Cold War-era political science dreamed up in response to the history of proxy wars between rival superpowers, this 60-year old idea is now a permanent and timeless part of the Star Trek universe that cannot be left behind or seriously interrogated. Because anything else would be disrespectful to continuity.
I don't remember the first Ant-Man movie in a lot of detail, but part of what made it one of the better MCU films isn't just the lowered stakes of "pulling a heist" vs. "saving all of reality." It's that Lang and Pym's motives require both of them to actively avoid being noticed by heroes; even regular police officers and security guards are a threat.
Same for the 2nd movie. And it's why Quantumania fell flat; Ant Man isn't the kind of hero that should be doing epic stuff.
@@stevejakab274 The first movie, a LOT of the conflict and payoff was about personal stuff, NOT about universe level threats. It was about an ex-con not being able to make it in society, it was about the trauma of losing a family member. It was about blended families not treating each other like the enemy. A LOT of comic books had personal drama arcs that the character's superpowers couldn't really help with.
@@stevejakab274I think the idea of ant man squad being thrusted into the limelight for 3 could have worked, especially since it would only make sense after endgame and their importance in it.
It’s just that because the story is mostly in the quantum realm, there’s no actual conflict or development with their new popularity.
Granted, it probably wouldn’t be able to fit it in with the heavy focus on quantum realm
@@pian-0g445 I liked Quantumania, but it really has 2 big main problems:
1) MCU's weird improvisation scheduling. In any other logical world, Quantumania would have been the 2nd to last Phase 4 film/show, and then the final Phase 4 film(s) would be the gathering of the New Avengers VS Kang the Conqueror's siege on the entire world (basically a movie adaptation of EMH's 2-Parter about Kang), ending with the End credits of "yeah sure. they got rid of Kang. 1 of MILLIONS who are all coming to Earth to test the New Avengers".
BUT because different stuff that couldn't happen. But that's less the movie's fault, and more the scheduling problem of everyone trying to do their own thing, Phase 4 being "throw everything to the wall to see what sticks", adapting to the troubled production, CO VI, etc.
2) They don't really commit to the happy ending. I like that, unlike the previous 2 films, it actually ends on a happy ending, instead of a big cliffhanger (especially considering ant-man and wasp ended like that) but could have been more. They even have it set-up with the montage at the beginning of how their lives are going.
Have Scott now be a toursit guide to the people coming from the Quantum Realm to Earth (and maybe viceversa), have Hope at her company working with some people from the quantum realm (the goo guy with translator goo, MODOK / Darren, still with anger issues, some of the cyber ants).
That way you can have it end in a "everything is going so well.... maybe too much" (cue post credits of the upcoming kangs)
I agree. I feel like most of the non team MCU movies should stick to that scope.
CW Arrowverse actually had a fun throwaway line about why Constantine couldn't help the Arrow group with stuff in his wheelhouse: "He's literally in Hell," which is completely in character for Constantine and an actual good reason.
And the throwaway line about how shit always goes down in Central City in the month of May lmfao
Heroes can create their own villains, but I think people forget that more often than not villains actually create their own heroes.
Again as Tolkien more or less said: evil itself is self destructive.
"Yeah, people love a villain. You know what they love even more than a villain? They love to see a villain fall, fail. Die trying."
@@PyreWell except for Megamind though, at first he was a super villain and rule the city after “killing” Metroman, and then turn into a Hero after accidentally created his own Frankenstein of a fake hero man child turn Villain, and rediscovered his own destiny. Neo Cortex from Crash Bandicoot a lovable loser Villain, he created his own hero/arch nemesis despite constant failure after failure never gives up and somewhat escape the never ending cycle of platforming game, for a while at least.
@@longwlenguyen4214it's pretty heavily implied that Megamind isn't really a threat to Metrocity and is more of just a nuisance so people really don't care about him. Once Titan shows up and starts going all murder tyrant, they see a villain they want to fall and Megamind delivers.
I'm pretty sure Samus wouldn't have killed Ridley if he hadn't been so evil and ate her parents, so yeah
So, can we summarize the later MCU as "Tony desperately tries to quit being Iron Man until he dies"?
They might have intentionally followed the plot to Black Sabbath's "Iron Man"
"He travels time for the future of mankind"
"Vengeance from the grave, kills the people he once saved"
The whole MCU was about Tony the entire time, really. Tony’s always doing stuff outside his own movies, he made Ultron, he backed Spider-Man, he started the Civil War plotline, he went to space and lost Peter, he solved time travel in a night, Tony Tony Tony Tony Tony all the way down it’s Tony.
@@Atle-ez7ir It was never pretending to be anything otherwise. He was the primary protagonist, and the Avengers only formed once _he_ was ready to be part of a team.
That's pretty much it, yeah. He kept relapsing and they kept making a point about his trauma constantly causing him to over prepare for a catastrophe.
They work like an actual comic run and this seem to mirror the 60s with the first issues of Iron Man Hulk and Thor leading to the first crossover comic. And those issues and characters affected everything just like it does with the mcu.@@Atle-ez7ir
Regarding the corruption of Gotham Cops: I read a fanfic where Nightwing was in another city helping other heroes, and after stopping the villains and chatting to the heroes, he handed over the weapon the villains had been using and said something like "yeah I picked this up on instinct but actually I guess your cops can probably be trusted not to sell it or steal it, so I don't have to take it home! :)" and I like. Readjusted my view of Bats taking "trophies" completely.
That's such a great line for nightwing, fanfiction is a blessing
Dude, give us the link!
@@emanuelrojas2 I'm sorry, I don't remember which one it was! I read SO MUCH fanfiction ;o;
@@CelynBrum, could it be Us vs. Them: the fanfiction?
so heres a thing the cops may be corrupt but their still cops, so in dark knight rises they would still go into the underground because they dont work for Bane, and the various backers dont want bane in their city either. Corrupt doesnt mean inactive it just means that they have other loyaties
Regarding Black Widow seeming busy. A great part giving that vibe was her interrogation phone call.
They literally call her into the plot, while she is in the middle of another mission.
This directly shows that she is busy, but quick to come when needed.
I honestly like Batman stories that give a clear timeline of how his crime fighting career goes. At first he goes after small time crooks, then larger gangs, and eventually the big boy gangsters. After taking out enough a power vacuum occurs which is quickly occupied by rising supervillains who then start competing with the regular crooks, driving them out. Eventually independent crooks are an endangered species because they can't do their thing without a superhero busting them or even supervillains getting rid of competition, leaving only the supervillain plots to foil by heroes for the most part. This is a knife's edge of peace and security but it does explain why you don't see the heroes tackling as many small level threats later in their careers as you would expect. At least that's how I always justified it in my head.
Ooo. Interesting thought!
And those lower level criminals get swept up as goons and henchmen for the supervillains
@@nathankurtz8045and depending on the story (usually comedy ones) they will state that being a henchmen has benefits (health, dental, vision, ect.) which really justifies street goons joining up as henchmen, atleast the Joker will pay for the hospital visit after Batman breaks your legs.
@@jasonreed7522
Yeah, I think it was even was stated in a serious comic by a henchman that if you survive Joker's murderious outbursts, you will be set for life, because he pays well as hell, since Joker is sorta of a anarchist who sees money as useless, he will give you plenty.
@@aldiascholarofthefirstsin1051 we can also safely assume the Joker is loaded because the stunts he pulls aren't exactly cheap.
And in one now memed comic panel he says he's crazy enough to fight Batman, but not crazy enough to take on the IRS. While this was probably intended as a throw away line, it has a lot of lore implications:
- the Joker pays all his taxes, including on illegal income per US tax law (its a catch 22, tell the government about your crimes or be guilty of tax evasion)
- the Joker's organization has clean enough books to do this
- considering how many goons he has this would require an accounting department and likely an HR department (probably only a couple people each but still)
- he can probably survive an audit better than the Wayne family can, which is wild to think about (ignoring joker's criminal activity of course)
Consider how every criminal has goons its reasonable to ifer they all operate somewhat like Joker because otherwise Joker's better benefits would steal the majority of the goon labor demand. And at this point you have to wonder if the government has invented another type of organization just to handle these "unconventional buisness models". (Not where i expected the comment to go but whatever, this is what happens when we run to the logical extremes of throw away lines we weren't supposed to think that hard about)
I feel like the thing the MCU is missing are sidekicks. They are the ones who take care of things while the boss is away, or the small time stuff that doesn't warrant your Batman coming out to punch someone. I loved the OG run of Teen Titans, because that entire series was basically just "Robin and his friends try their best to solve things without involving the Justice League", and they were great! The characters got to have evolving storylines without being overshadowed, the world felt alive, and by extension, it zoomed the microscope in even further on how alive the world of the Justice League was, because there was all this happening even beyond the heavy hitters going out and doing stuff all the time.
the problem with that is marvel in general doesnt do sidekicks often, theyll have members of teams rhat act as mentor characters like cyclops or captain america and older heroes will act as mentors to younger heroes with similar powers or take up their mantle like peter to miles, logan to laura, or tony to riri, but they never stick around as a mentor/sidekick duo, theyll team up for a few issues, an arc or two at the most, and then go their separate ways, dc is the property thats all about sidekicks helping out older heroes all of the time
The problem with introducing young heroes in the MCU is that they won’t be young by the time of the next movie. Like assuming we do see Kate bishop and The third Cassie Lang again they are going to be quite a bit older from the last time we saw them.
Same is true for whatever they decide to do with Ms Marvel and to their credit they knew enough to get her into a project not long after her show
No. *Marvel doesn't do sidekicks.* In the Marvel Comics Universe in-universe explanation is the story of Bucky Barnes. When there's a teen hero in Marvel, they're either part of teams like the X-Men or solo heroes from the get go like Spider-Man. This is one of the Distinguishing factors between DC and Marvel.
@@Oturan20 I mostly agree, but with the caveat that it stopped doing the /classic/ sidekick, where there's the actual hero and the sidekick is somebody who's just sort of attached to them permanently like a tick.
When Marvel does it, it's closer to actual mentoring: the sidekick is a full character in their own right, and is being taught the ropes with the express intent that they're going to break off and do their own thing after a bit.
It also has a fair bit of the "support staff" type, where there's one or two secondary characters who usually help behind the scenes but will ocassionaly step up more directly... though that's more of a "what precisely do you consider a sidekick?" sort of deal. For some, they count, for others they don't.
That kind a does not quite work when the Teen Titans were dealing with Trigon, a demon who literally turned the entire world into hell. Like....did nobody from the Justice League show up and ask "WTF did just happen there?". When Slade was leading Trigon's army on the Titans, did Robin not think "Well, shit. Better call some reinforcements?". All we get is a funny Interaction with the Doom Patrol that shows that apparently nobody is even aware that the Titans reversed the Apocalypse, given how Cyborg has to explain that to them.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comics running during the Civil War film had a whole little sidebar where Spiderman tries to convince Squirrel Girl to join and she literally responds "I'm kinda busy fighting DINOSAUR ULTRON IN ANTARCTICA, can I assume your problem will probably resolve itself with little consequences?" and honestly I would take a whole series of Squirrel Girl Ignores the MCU
I think I’m retrospect that’s almost hilarious since his “problems” with regards to civil war are some of the most long lasting of that time to the point we now get to see him being cucked
Squirrel Girl has so many amazing comics, I'm so SO glad the MCU hadn't tried their thing with her yet lol
@@SlimeBlueMS lol SG is the most powerful character in marvel they would have to nerf her too much
@@SlimeBlueMSshe almost had a show that was filmed for a pilot but was canceled
Oh man, her saying that to Peter certainly didn't age well.
It's worth mentioning in Iron Man 1 that Obadiah put a hit out on Tony, and he was also the one selling the weapons to the bad guys. To me that seems less like Tony creating his villain and more like Obadiah created Iron Man.
This! Makes me happy that people DO pay attention to movie storylines and not just getting distracted by the pretty pictures.
After Iron Man 2 and Civil War, it's implied (or maybe I'm reading into it) that Obadiah Stain was HYDRA and involved with the assassination of Howard Stark. This would mean that the BBEG unintentionally created Iron Man.
Yeah, Tony's change of heart wasn't because 'Oh no my weapons kill people??' it was 'Oh damn someone's smuggling my weapons'. He knows weapons kill people, he's not a dumbass, he just thought that his weapons would be used by the 'good' guys because he sold weapons to the US military(which is an entire can of worms on its own but lets not get there). His pride didn't come from 'haha I make cool things that go boom' it was 'My weapons defend our country'.
He stopped making weapons and made the suit to destroy the smuggled ones because he realized he couldn't control his weapons.
I really don't like the 'And then he got on the other side of his missile, realized weapons kill people, and decided to blow them up' take because it's not really correct and it's clearly a mocking take on Iron Man's motivations when basically the only two thoughts bouncing around this man's head (inbetween bouts of ptsd) is "Protect people" and "Fix my screw ups", which is honestly, one more thought than seems to bounce around in most other superhero's heads.
Somewhat related, people keep blaming Tony for a of villains when a decent chunk are at best, only partially his fault.
Tony is more complicit than creating him, but he stillis enabling obidiah by not interfering.
@@allenl5960 Definitely seems like a trend that people blame heroes for a villain's existence or actions. I get it in some cases, but a lot of the time it seems more the villain is responsible for not taking the villain out of commission and they escape again. Even that is a flimsy argument when you could argue the people in charge of imprisoning them should be responsible for that, and the legal system should insure the death penalty for someone like the joker or someone similar.
On the topic of the Joker, depending on what continuity, the Joker was partly made by Batman. Of course the events that lead up to the Joker becoming the Joker were not influenced by Batman as I recall, he had already been doing crimes, he just got a makeover and marketable branding because of Batman.
The crazy thing about Far From Home is it HAD a scene of Peter dealing with street level crime and protecting his neighbourhood. And it even contained a joke about him telling the police they'd have to pick up the slack while he's gone. It ended up deleted but it's in "Peter's To Do List" on the blu-ray.
It's a shame because while it isn't him rescuing civvies it still has him flipping about doing fun web tricks, messing with people and quipping, and even bantering with the local cops in a way that implies he has rapport with them (aka does this a lot)
The MCU is currently shooting its own toes with the way things are heading to.
It also had tom hollands brother hanging upside down i believe
This whole Sherlock/Moriarty thing also reminds me of another thing : how I feel like nowadays people just think Episodic storytelling is bad storytelling ? Like, if an episode of something is self-contained, it's seen as "Filler" or "Skippable". I love the show Amphibia, and it annoys me how many people are willing to tell people to Skip episodes because they don't matter to the plot.
It's as if they just want to know the plot without feeling the emotions of it ? Self-contained episodes can do wonders to build the world, and the characters. Making both feel alive.
If everything is always part of the "Bigger Plot" or part of some villain's schemes, it can really REALLY kill the worldbuilding IMO (see the ending of Naruto for example)
I was seeing another thread elsewhere about how people are wishing for a return to episodic storytelling, actually. So you're certainly not the only person with this feeling. Part of the problem is that the reason for specific styles of storytelling aren't really about the story, but rather about how publication and distribution happen, so the stories have to fit their media. And right now, there's a prestive TV craze, so everything has to be tightly written 8-episode seasons. Who knows where we'll be in ten years.
Ooh, yeah, that is a very interesting question actually. Like, I will say that personally, I tend to like shows with a sense of overarching plot the best, but I don't think that's so much an attraction to having some big bad that gets constantly built up, but rather, a want to see the protagonists themselves grow and develop through the show, and that can absolutely happen through episodic storytelling. Take something like A:TLA for instance, and also Amphibia, like you said! Not everything serves the Big Grand Plot, but it doesn't have to. This is something that's bugged me for a while, honestly, just wondering why some finales feel so empty to me... that is, when the show/book focuses very heavily on the big villain, with everything feeding into that "Bigger Plot," and it relentlessly builds up hype for this final showdown, and then it, well, happens. The big epic final battle happens. And then it's over. This could just be me, but that big epic battle just doesn't feel rewarding when that's EVERYTHING the plot leads towards, I think. It goes back to this very video about the feeling of emptiness in worlds. In my opinion, I think that feeling also exists when the characters you focus on don't have lives/purposes outside of the current plot. And yeah, you know, episodic storytelling could work for that, when the story you're telling fits with that. It's about making both the world and their lives feel dynamic and interesting, and making the whole story feel like an adventure in itself, rather than a means to an end.
@@TheRoseFrontier That is totally fair ! I think the best way to do it is something in the middle. A story with a big overarching plot, with some episodic shenanigans in the middle. And yeah the problem is a lot of people will see these episodes as "Filler" and tell people to skip them. A:TLA is a good comparison actually.
I am not against skipping some episodes, but I'd say people should at least watch them all on their first watchthrough.
It's becaus they've been ruined by bingeable streaming service shows and anime full of filler arcs
Serialized storytelling tends to hit people’s dopamine more, I think, because it stretches out whatever “tension” the show might be going for
It's worth pointing out another genre where this shows up a lot. In a lot of post-cold-war espionage movies, most especially the Mission Impossible series, about 90% of the threats and villains are rogue members of the "good guy" espionage agencies, to the extent that you start to feel like whatever useful purpose these agencies serve is vastly outweighed by their capacity to churn out world-class villains.
I think it goes to show that the real villains of the Cold war were the CIA and KGB
Further exemplified in the latest Mission Impossible movie when the main character becomes a rogue agent himself after finding out the "good guy" organization is just as awful as the villains. Then that organization is pretty much a non factor for the rest of the movie, because they're incompetent as fuck without the main character on their side.
@@saucevc8353 Has the organization itself been much of a factor in most of the movies? I feel like usually they just have on "secretary" guy who exists to finger wag at Ethan for going rogue, and they exist to leave a bunch of gadgets in convenient staches.
Where the commentary writes itself
Maybe we don’t need extremely invasive and expensive intelligence agencies that don’t do that much nowadays
@@AbisexualCarpenter But sir, Operation Fast and Furious will be a rounding success! Right after we give the cartels these guns.
One of the best things narrative wise (gameplay wise it gets old) in the Insomniac Spider-Man game is the random crime you can stumble across and stop. It shows that even though Peter has big issues he's dealing with, he still takes the time to help the little guys.
That's something I loved about those games. Other stories seem like they have a hard time integrating side quests in a way which is balanced with the main story.
But I fully believe Spider Man would leave the food bank, have to save all the seagulls from a rogue chemical spill, then go punch Doc Oct all in one day.
*assuming you, the player, can be bothered at the moment.
Its weird that muggings seem beneith Iron Man's skillset meanwhile saving a cat from a tree is totally something Superman would do
Maggie Mae Fish has a whole set of videos about Superman, and the first one is called “Why Superman Saves the Cat”
They’re good.
I think the difference is that Tony becomes Iron Man in large part to address major threats (that he created), he didn't want to stop muggings and save cats from trees, he wanted to disarm terrorists, and in MCU Tony's case it's increasingly not so much about a desire to help people per se as it is a very elaborate, protracted penance for lives ruined. On the other hand, Clark got his start stopping muggings and saving cats, even when it was ambiguous whether Superman was the mask or the man, Clark was in it to help people, it feels less like "Well Darkseid is being chill this week and Luthor's on vacation, I'm bored so let's put the fear of God in some muggers" and more like "mostly I use my powers to scare off creeps and help Mrs Jenkins get her cat down, but you're saying that im uniquely qualified to take on this evil space dude?? Well, it would be irresponsible not to then, let's go"
Basically, as I see it, Iron Man is constantly cleaning up his own mess and trying to atone and random relatively petty issues seem weird for him to address, other people's problems need to become big enough to become his before he'll lend a hand. Superman, on the other hand, always just wants to help people and if today that means getting a cat out of a tree and tomorrow getting the League together to deal with the impending alien invasion, well that's just how it goes and what matters is he can help.
Well, in Iron Man's case, there's the question of if flying a big robot suit to the scene is really the most energy efficient way of solving that problem.
I think it's because the Iron Man suit is really only worth using for more major threats, while Superman can just dial down his output a bit and take care of street-level issues just fine. Like, if Iron Man walked around doing low-grade work in that big suit of his, it's kind of a weird aesthetic because he'd be basically Robocop. Meanwhile, Superman could literally get a cat out of a tree while just walking around as Clark Kent.
I'd think that certain hero classes are involved. Like Thor or Superman is A or S tier class for big threats, while C or D is more The Question or Daredevil.
On a side note one of the things I love The Batman 2022 is they actually make Batman a good detective because he’s clever and not because he established a Batman surveillance state.
It also establishes that Batman is doing stuff besides chasing Riddler. He goes to see a previously-apprehended Joker, he's stopping muggings, he's doing all the stuff and then some dude decides to be a serial killer. He even asks "should I even exist? Am I why this happened?" And answer to both questions is yes.
the Batriot Act
@@imnotherenow200 The La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo????
He figures out the Riddler's plan due to the dumb luck of a cop that happens to be on the scene knowing about how carpets are installed. Pitch Meeting even makes fun of that.
@@stevejakab274 Even that ties into the thematic point of him being too disconnected from the world outside of fighting crime though.
I need a Detail Diatribe that's just "This is why Earth's Mightiest Heroes is the best" and it's just Red gushing about this show for two hours
I need it so bad...
In the meantime may i recommend Pillar of Garbage. A good 2/3s of his channel is EMH
it was amazing how revolutionary it felt when My Adventures with Superman had Clark clean up after a fight. like sure he couldn't repair absolutely everything that was broken, but he at least used his super speed and super strength to clean up lol.
We've been dealing with Snyder Superman for a decade, so a story that's competent reminds us why we like the character in the first place.
Superman actually did that back then as well
@@Horatio787it says a lot when even the salamanders of 40k are more heroic than a mainstream version of Superman who’s entire point wasn’t just “but what if he’s evil”
@@creed8712 It wasn't even "What if he's evil" it was "Super Man" in the """"real"""" "world".
There’s a Batman comic on webtoon, and I’m just remembering one chapter where Nightwing realizes Alfred is going to be alone for Thanksgiving, and he calls Jason Todd, who is in the middle of a firefight in the Amazon and is like, “you have three days to get back to Gotham. It’s for Alfred.” And Jason does exactly that! It’s clear he had other stuff going on, but he prioritizes Alfred over that stuff
The Robins may have problems with Bruce, But they all love Alfred.
In wayne family adventures. They dont have a problem per se with bats. They have daddy issues of course. But honestly reasonable.
STILL MAD THAT THE VIXEN COMIC GOT THE BOOT BEFORE IT GOT TO EXPLORE SOME OF THE DEEPER AND MORE DAY TO DAY STUFF FOR HER.
The platonic and familial relationships in DC are really great when they're shown functioning well and not merely implied so that shallow audience heartbreak can occur when they're inevitably ripped apart. I specifically will forever be mad about the writers who ship Bruce Wayne/Barbra Gordon just to cause drama and complications. Even without the age gap it's so weird family and friend-dynamic wise and is the only part of the Animated universe that makes me recoil like I've bitten into a mouldy lemon.
That is my favorite episode in that whole series so far. Next favorite would be the one where Bruce needs to go to a party and explains to Alfred why he can't bring any of the kids (Dick shows off too much, Cassandra bails immediately, Damian is a violent gremlin etc.) And at the end he suggests "You could come with me Alfred" and he smirkingly responds "You don't pay me enough sir"
It's very clear in that webtoon that the batfam always has stuff to do and most of the time it is street level threats rather than constant super villains.
The “default opening conflict” often involves burning buildings or vehicle crashes for a reason. They’re morally uncomplicated, real-life scary and require heroic courage to save people from.
Patton Oswalt actually just came out with a comic based around this concept, but from the perspective of D-List Villains. It's called Minor Threats, and it's basically about street-level nobodies trying to eke out a living in a universe of the kind of impossibility that can only exist in a superhero universe. And this is all in the background as it basically retells the Joker's killing of Jason Todd, with them all struggling to survive as the rules of the game are changed FOREVER.
Super crooks on netflix is kinda like this, it technically takes place in the Jupiter rising universe but it straight does not matter. It's really good, basically a bunch of b list super criminals launch a heist against a major villain. It's great
Damn that sounds good. I am going to look into Minor Threats.
It was good but ending was rushed. Needed more chapters imo
@@silvarace That's actually the Jupiter's Legacy universe.
There is also an old comic series called Hench that was about the same thing focused on the life of a low ranking career henchmen.
I did feel the Civil War argument in the movies lost something when nobody pointed out 'hey, remember that time the World Security Council tried to nuke New York to deal with an already-mostly-defeated alien army?'
And also "Remember the time the guy who would be in charge of us invaded a university without warning and put a bunch of teens in danger?"
“Remember when Hydra used the US government surveillance on all Americans with a plan to make drone strikes across DC based on political leanings?”
“Remember when this accord literally violates US law and imposes prison without trial?”
we don't talk about the incredible hulk... @@DragonbIaze052
@@DragonbIaze052 General Thaddeus?
@@DragonbIaze052which film was that in
I singlehandedly got sold on superman by OSP, I used to think he was a shallow character and now I absolutely love him
what is osp ?
@@Athorment overly sarcastic productions
And you've also had it ruined for you that everytime someone tries to make Superman "cool" they're just doing Superman poorly :D
Yeah, superman's not technically supposed to be cool, is he? Only on rare occasion
@@gianni206 what people find cool is subjective. Being edgy like Vegeta or uncaring like Batman might be cool to some, but in real life they would be the lamest people to be around with
If Being a decent human being who cares about others and leads by example is "Boring", then i want to be the uncoolest dude ever.
It’s interesting to think about how in tokusatsu shows and tokusatsu-inspired magical girl anime, the hero retiring after defeating the main villain absolutely IS the default genre expectation. These heroes exist only to fight one specific villain in a world that is otherwise free of trouble, and when that is achieved at the end of the season, the hero has no need to be a hero anymore and will often explicitly lose their powers permanently. In the rare cases that a show is renewed for a second season (rather than being followed by a new installment in the same franchise, like Super Sentai and Pretty Cure is wont to do), the heroes usually need to be explicitly re-powered at the arrival of a new threat, because in between threats the audience DOES expect them to retire to mundane lives. In other words, the answer to the question “does the world still need Sailor Moon after the Dark Kingdom is defeated?” is explicitly NO.
And in these shows, it’s usually explicitly a personal journey for the characters, whereas any philosophical journey is secondary. So it makes sense that this cycle of empower and de-power of the cast is a full hero’s journey. Only taking home how the cast’s lives and relationships have changed amongst the mundane due to their experiences in the exciting parts.
And even with DragonBall Z, I really like how in between villain appearances, they show how the boys spend their peace time, just chilling eating good food and doing dad stuff while their wives have a science research job.
I mea silor moon yesthey kinda retire till its clear that lot popupand ys she is needed.
It's basically referencing Cincinattus. We idolize those who use power only to fix a problem, and are more than willing to go back to living a humble life once they are no longer needed.
@@samwallaceart288 Dragon Ball is a bit of a unique case, because the characters justify their own power. Goku isn't a superhero, he's a _martial artist_ . Yeah he rises up to the occasion when he needs to, but punching stuff and training to become stronger isn't just "what needs to be done", it's his hobby, his favorite thing to do, and his way of life in general. That does also put contrast between him/Vegeta/Piccolo/Tien who keep training all day erry day, and the others who found other callings and are usually seen pursuing them when the world isn't at stake.
Regarding Iron Man, Tony was perfectly aware that his weapons were killing people. He was fine with that. It wasn't until he saw that people other than *America* were getting easy access to his tools. "I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons that I created to defend them and protect them".
Yeah, basically. That was the point going back to Stan Lee's original creation of the character. He wanted to take someone modern audiences would hate, a war profiteer, and make him someone they could root for
I’d at least give them props for not stopping it there. He stops making weapons because of watching soldiers get killed right in front of him. He _becomes_ _Iron_ _Man_ because Yinsen’s village being attacked. And now he has a face to put to all the non-Americans that he himself put in harms way. And it finally hits home to him the extent of what he’s done.
looks at the date of movie: 2008
thinks about the early 2000s
ah yes, makes sense, middle east bad
To play devil's advocate a bit, Tony had an unconscious assumption that his weapons were being used by the US military only, which has a reputation, (true or false), of avoiding collateral damage.
Seeing his weapons not only used against Americans but also but terrorists... was a huge wakeup call.
@@oktalley99To be fair, you can pick a year that the US is on the international stage and they probably have roughly the same relationship with the middle east.
These superhero based Detail Diatribes are really becoming my go to for affirming my childhood issues with superhero movies. It feels like every one brings up problems I called out when I was young and no one believed me.
I totally understand how that feels.
One of the biggest ones fir me is MCU spiderman
The kid really isn't very smart and feels like a sidekick to iron-man the entire time and people don't seem to notice how this Peter barely has any smarts when it matters or lacks conviction in being a hero.
Also he's such a sick up to Tony it's embarrassing for someone that likes the older spidermans
@feritperliare2890 You're definitely not alone on that one. The MCU Spider-Man feels like a white washed Miles Morales, complete with his supporting cast and hero worship. The movies have their moments, but the character himself feels thrown together.
I wish they had Tom Holland play Speedball instead. He would have fit into their world better and could have helped launch the newer generation of heroes easier by starting the New Warriors.
@@NegaHumanX I feel like you've got a point, but Marvel loves it's brand synergy, and to my knowledge, Speedball has been dead in the comics since the first Civil War. (I don't know if he's been revived since, so correct me if I'm wrong). Not to mention the fact that not many people outside of comic book readers know who he is. I didn't even know who he was until the first Civil War because I mainly read Avengers, Thor, and Iron Man.
@@nofacejames Sorry this reply got long.😅
I think it was definitely a recognizability/timing thing to rush Spider-Man into the MCU. But I think it was more to meet the fan demand and beat Batman v Superman then because they didn't think they'd be able to sell audiences on a new character.
Pre-MCU, the average non-comic fan (maybe) knew Marvel had Spider-Man, Hulk, and the X-Men. We had the Blade/FF/Ghost Rider era movies, but a lot of people didn't even know which ones of them belonged to which company.
I used to blow peoples minds by telling them Blade and Spidey lived in the same universe.
Despite being important comic characters Cap, IM, and Thor were all barely known outside of people who saw those 90s Spider-Man cartoon episodes about Cap or the hated Iron Man cartoon. The vibe around them was very Aquaman-like and that's why the MCU was such a big thing. They took a risk on these underrated IP and it paid off.
I remember everyone saying the Hulk was going to be the big seller and there was no way Cap could do well. Then Hulk ended up being the bottom of the barrel and Guardians of the flipping Galaxy, a group even my more geeky friends didn't know about, hit the top. So I don't think it would have been an issue to bring in a barely known like Speedball (especially since it was a vs movie between two of the characters the MCU made household names) but more like they wanted the Spidey fans to shut up about bringing him in and wanted to beat out Batman V Superman at the box office so they used him as bait.
Speedball was presumed dead in the explosion in Civil War but survived. His family was harassed for it and he became Penance, coming back to his old identity after being edgy for a bit.
I think Invincible is an adaptation that manages to have a world that feels full and alive with its superheroes.
yeah, there are always more threats of different levels
To be honest I'd like Invincible a lot more if it wasn't so gruesome and if the ending didn't take a dump on the concept of superheroes.
@@lexofexcel886 I'm curious what you mean by that. I feel like Invincible is generally very pro superhero
@@lexofexcel886thats what makes it different imo
@@lexofexcel886putting in terms osp uses, I think Invencible is embarrassed of being super hero show
I literally learned about that deleted Avengers scene about Cap struggling with existing just last week and it pisses me off to no end that its not a part of the actual movie, its so good.
I think the thing to consider while watching this is that Red enjoys thinking about media theory for lack of a better term. So her critiques of the MCU may just be an expression of one way she seriously enjoys engaging with media. TLDR, she likes the MCU in a different that you do, and that’s not a bad thing.
I can’t believe criticism has become so demonized that people actually have to be told this and soothed by saying “don’t worry, this person still loves loves loves the thing they dare point out criticism with!!” in order to not hate it on sight. Media literacy really is dead.
Makes sense. I also tend to ruminate and overanalyze things I like or enjoy. I think it's also a matter of seeing and accepting flaws in stories one enjoys.
Whenever I write a Spider-Man story where the stakes get too high, I always give the same explanation: The Avengers are in space fighting a different Supervillain. Because I imagine everyone is just like “Yeah. That makes sense”
I remember a moment in Web of Shadows where that happens. Peter is on the phone trying to call people and one of the answering machine messages is something like “We’re sorry, Reed Richards can’t come to the phone right now as he is in another universe fighting an inter dimensional threat. Please leave a message after the beep.”
I never liked Spider-Man fighting too high stakes battles. My own personal thought on the MCU Spider-Man is that it would have been awesome if Spider-Man had been operating for years before the Avengers. Maybe 3-5 years. It would be amazingly interaction if during the invasion of New York, Spider-Man was focusing on saving people while the Avengers fought the threat. It would have been nice to see Spider-Man setting the difference of focus on rescue(which in Marvel is usually vigilantes Spider-Man, Ms.Marvel, Dare Devil) to fighting the big threats(superheroes in Marvel i.e. Captain America, Iron Man.)
@@macthemeh when they did something like that in EMH about the fantastic four during the new avengers episode.
the rest of the team went to a space peace conference, but ben stayed because he wanted to watch the game
This is kind of what they did in the first Ant-Man; but instead if being too busy to 'come to the phone,' Hank Pim was holding a 30 year old grudge against a dead man.
@@melissaharris3389 I mean, considering tony's track record (especially with how ultron was most likely a recent event).
HOWEVER, Endgame basically showed that, if Pym had swallowed his pride, and took a leap of faith, there is a chance he might have rescued Janet sooner if he had at least asked Tony. Given Tony understood the Pym particles enough to create time travel
which probably explains why pym is seen attending his funeral, and why either him or hope are seen sharing the pym particles with others (like hawkeye)
Hey now, Batman doesn’t end The Dark Knight by retiring. He ends it by becoming a fugitive. The whole “he retired” thing isn’t mentioned until part 3, which *is* a weird decision but it isn’t a fault of part 2.
This! So much this. Batman retiring wasn't even a blip on my radar until Rises came along. The way Dark Knight ended, it always came off to me as "Batman's gonna keep doing what he's doing, it's just now people are going to be hunting and hating him (more than they already did, and this time for justifiable reasons)". It would have made Batman even more of an underground vigilante hero, which could have been AWESOME for a new movie!
I will never understand a lot of the decisions they made for Rises, and making it so that Batman retired for 8 years is easily one of the biggest question marks.
Dark Knight does have Harvey mention that Batman can't hope to keep doing this forever - like how a lot of professional athletes retire when they're in their 30's.
@@AlphaoftheDeluge My guess is they had an idea for a third movie with the Joker returning as the villain and Batman fighting both the mob AND the police, but then Heath Ledger sadly passed away and that idea went down the toilet. So we got Dark Knight Rises instead.
Not to mention, it was explained explicitly in 'Dark Knight Rises' that Batman was ALLOWED to retire; the Dent Act nebulously enhanced the police force, providing them with the tools they needed to clean up the streets of Gotham. It doesn't mean crime has vanished - or that it didn't start to creep back in during Batman's retirement - just that the events of 'Dark Knight' and the apparent sacrifice of Batman's goodness changed Gotham in such a way that made Batman all but unnecessary.
@@AlphaoftheDelugeRise exists to pay for Interstellar.
I love how I’m both Civil war events, the near death of Spider-Man is treated as the “do you have any idea what the fuck your just did?” Moment, because no matter what side Spider-Man is on he is almost always the morally high ground of the team, and universally beloved by everyone so when one of the sides KILLS HIM, everyone is shaken to the core about how far this has gone
I think you missed an actual really great moment for Cap from Endgame. The support group he runs and when he tells Widow about the whales shows that when he isn’t needed for his strength and his shield, he is still helping however he can.
There is plenty I don’t like about the MCU and Endgame in particular, but Captain America’s running theme throughout isn’t his powers, it’s his drive to help out whoever needs it in whatever way he can.
Yeah, that kept popping up in my head with the whole dissection of Captain America. In Endgame, his whole support group.
He went out, and he became a therapist. He's helping people cope with their entire world vanishing overnight, a problem he's *uniquely* suited for.
Like Red said, they're super heroes because they have the ability to fight a problem, and there's a problem for them to fight.
Just because he's not wearing a costume, doesn't mean he stops being Captain America
@@lorelord2418 i think that's the "bias against the MCU and adaptations" popping there.
I actually haven't seen "Endgame" (FAR behind on MCU), so take this with a grain of salt, but: I think it still fits Red's point, because running a support group isn't really a SUPERHERO thing. It shows that Steve is still a good guy who wants to help people, but he's doing what ANY good guy could. It drives in the fact that, when space gods aren't destroying the Earth, there somehow aren't any crimes or natural disasters for a super soldier to deal with.
@@joemerl1145 I think this is more a case of "MCU having a problem about having villains who do bad guy stuff for fun".
For some reason, they kinda refuse to just have a generic villain just to punch.
And when they don't kill the villain, they have them reform (Loki), or actually put in jail where they stay there and are no longer a menace.
With Some exceptions like Kingpin
I get they try to avoid the problem of comics of "no matter how many times they throw the villain in jail / they are killed, they get out / resurrect and come back to cause ruckus", and try to be "realistic" about it on how to deal with bad guys and problems like that (wipe them out entirely or rehabilitate them), but it becomes a problem, when you don't have at least other bad guys to replace the one you got rid of, contributing to the "empty world problem".
She-Hulk somehow is one fo the few products to actually introduce a recurring bad guy (Titania), that doesn't suddenly turns good shortly after, or dies, but they kinda waste her bykeep portraying her for laughs only (and in fact, her sole existence basically undermines a lot of things the show try to do); and yet they still did the "introduce a villain to immediately rehabilitate them", in the form of one of the members of the wrecking crew: wrecker...
AND In hindsight She-Hulk is an even bigger example of the "empty world problem", especially when you hear the show's title in spanish: she-hulk defender of heroes..... and she actually only defends 1 single "hero" (wong). and most of the people with powers that appear are normal civillians at best, jerks at worst, and the actual bad guys who want to be villains are just anticlimatically dealt with
@@joemerl1145but captain America is the only one that has had experience with his whole world mostly vanishing which makes him particuliarly suited to being a support group leader in that situation
I think the fact that Red loves Avengers: EMH and brings it up all the time demonstrates she clearly likes marvel when it’s properly executed.
Blue makes a fantastic point about how hard hitting it would be for a different Peter Parker to deliver the "With great power ..." line.
And Red immediately skewers it even harder.
For the "Blade" point, I feel a need to acknowledge that Blade isn't actually the only guy who's aware of and/or doing anything about vampires in Marvel. A relatively recent Moon Knight story had Moon Knight going up against a vampire cult/pyramid scheme specifically because they decided to try something in New York, and Moon Knight, who is one of two priests of a god whose main task is protecting travelers at night, obviously had a problem with the idea of a bunch of predatory nocturnal magic people who prey on non-magic people moving into the town he calls home.
That said, Blade is undoubtedly the best at killing vampires in the entire Marvel lineup. Moon Knight ends that storyline by effectively threatening Dracula, who had a guy infiltrate the cult, by basically saying "If you try anything here, I'm the first line of defense. I just took down an entire cult looking to make you irrelevant, so I'm willing to take my chances against you. And if I can't stop you, Blade definitely will."
Wait, Moon Knight ACTUALLY met Dracula?
…did he ask for his money?
To be fair, the Blade is originally from Tomb of Dracula comic and was just one from cast of vampire hunters.
What was funny was when the vampires tried hire Taskmaster to fight Moon Knight and he basically went "lmao, no"
In Which Moon Knight run does this happen??
Even in the blade comics he would occasionally run across other vampire hunters, some like night stalkers were halfway competent, and others were complete idiots that were only going to get themselves killed eventually.
Something that made Bionicle feel so special was it's focus on the mundane aspects of it's world. LEGO released Bionicle's first year of story through an online point and click adventure game where you played not as any of the heroes but a random villager occasionally getting a glimpse of the heroes as they were saving you and other villagers, even going so far as to point out that you have a habit of bumping into them while they're already dealing with another threat.
Not many toys at that time came with toys for the heroes, villains AND bystanders to save, it's what made it feel so alive.
Looking forward to your thoughts on My Adventures with Superman. It really emphasizes Superman’s greatest strength is that he isn’t corrupted by his power (at least, this version) and also has lots of “help random people” montages. The villains are often treated as the thing keeping Clark from saving people, rather than the primary reason for the show. I’ve been loving it.
In most of the hero tests in My Hero Academia there were two parts: the "fighting villains" and the "rescue" parts, and then with the power trio training it was "Rescue" "Villains" and "Evacuation". Like "Villains" are just 1/3rd of what they do.
In my opinion, the deal with Captain America not wanting the supervision by the governments was not about "standing around and doing nothing". Its about not being a weapon to governments. His previous experience with HYDRA shows that mass surveillance, counter terrorism and all that was a weapon used to subjugate the world. If superheroes were under the government it would become a "Doctor Manhattan in Vietnam" situation all over again
That was my take on the conflict on Civil War as well. He knows the government isn't the best ones currently to decide what the Avengers respond to. They would just become the super powered enforcers of the world councils will, and Cap wasn't about that. Tbh I completely agreed with him, but I also am not a fan of authority, while also following the rules that makes sense lol
The fact that the entire thing was being pushed by the man responsible for most Hulk Incidents, was my biggest red flag. It was obvious that he only wanted his super soldiers, and if he couldn’t get an army of Hulks, then he’d get his own pet Avengers as attack dogs.
@@coltonwilliams4153 yessssssssss
Winter Soldier showed him trying to do the government agent thing, but that government agency turned out to be basically controlled by Hydra, so of course he’s wary of doing that again.
I feel like the question left hanging is what would Captain America be doing if he didn’t have access to government or billionaire resources? Seems like all he does is paramilitary operations using expensive, high tech equipment with other military/billionaire employees.
You're spot on about movie 4 being waaaaay too late for Peter to get his motivation, however Uncle Ben's power-responsibility speech is not from the source material, it's a product of the Raimi movies. In the original comics, power-responsibility is given by the narration box, which years later will become Peter's inner monologue, making it a conclusion Peter comes to himself after Uncle Ben's death. The Raimi movies are heavily informed by the Ultimate comics, in which Uncle Ben does give half of the speech, but then several issues later, functionally the second half of it (sort of a contextualizing how-to) is given by J Jonah Jameson (you need to understand that Bendis is very pro journalists, so his version of Jonah has a deep sense of integrity, community responsibility, and is an objectively good human being.)
Incorrect. Attributing that to Uncle Ben goes back even further. Spider-Man the Animated Series (which aired it's last episode 4 years before the first Raimi film and 2 years before the release of Ultimate Spider-Man #1) has a scene with an alternate universe Uncle Ben trying to talk down an alternate reality Peter from destroying the multiverse by asking him what he always taught him, cue the line and that Peter committing suicide and the multiverse being saved.
Heck, even without that the quote is expressly stated at the end if Spider-Man's first appearance in comics and, based on the ending of that story, one can naturally infer that the source of said quote was Uncle Ben.
@@sertorrhenclegane
In the original comic Peter comes to that realization after Uncle Ben's death, WITH NO ONE to tell him that. He came it up himself.
@@acrsclspdrcls1365 Perhaps. But if one reads the words "at last aware..." you can extrapolate upon the idea that Peter had heard the phrase once (possibly many times) before and who would hear it from? His chief moral instructors, Uncle Ben and Aunt May. Uncle Ben's death gives the expression more pathos.
Which honestly hammers in just how weird a choice it was to kill off Aunt May just for that scene. The comics got by fine without it, its NOT necessary to Pete's character. They just wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
"Just doing what Superman would do."
I love this line. It is exactly what Superman aims to achieve. In that way, it is stealth/one of the most heartwarming moments in comics for me. With six words, this child completely destroys Lex Luthor's belief that Superman, by existing and helping, handicaps and coddles humanity.
When Superman was dead for a while in the 90s, one of the stories was the Justice League being called together in mid-December because it turns out that Superman used to get mail from people with their Christmas wishes, and he'd go grant some of those wishes - so the entire League splits up and each goes out to fill in for Kal.
Three points here:
- It takes the entire League to fill in for Superman just in this one thing.
- No-one knew about Superman doing this - the League only found out when the post office contacted them to ask about what to do with the mail.
- Of course Kal took the time to play Santa.
That’s part of the reason I always swear the Kingdom Come is the best deconstruction, not Watchmen, and certainly not Injustice.
Superman looses everything he cares about and still tries to uphold his values. He doesn’t loose faith in humanity until people are booing him for upholding justice, and praising Magog for straight up executing the joker on the steps of the court house. And even then Superman doesn’t go rogue, he just fucks off to the fortress of solitude for a few decades and this indirectly leads to the rest of the world becoming a much colder cynical place.
The underlying theme of the entire story is that it’s important for society to have an infallible icon of virtue to aspire towards even if that icon is built upon a lie because without that hope and inspiration the only thing keeping up going is our bassist of impulses.
There’s also a smaller meta narrative about heroes being a reflection of the society that birthed them.
I think a minor change in Aunt May's dialogue would've hit so much harder.
"Peter, stop. Do you remember what Ben use to say?"
It’s hilarious to me that MCU Spiderman and Netflix Daredevil live in the same universe, the same timeline, and the same New York, but have a completely different perspective on how frequent crime is in New York
New York is a big place, so I guess it’s different perspective…
Its queens vs hells kitchen perspective
34:00 The early seasons of Arrow really struck me as being "embarrassed to be a super hero show" particularly with the lengths it seemed to go to avoid calling Ollie "The Green Arrow"
A lot of Arrow, in hindsight as someone who used to watch it as it was coming out, was an attempt to make Green Arrow the CW’s Batman. They probably only cared about adapting the original Green Arrow comics enough to satiate Green Arrow fans by doing the bare minimum.
As the other commentator has said here, for the longest time they really wished WB would give them the OK for doing another Batman tv show. They never got it, so basically Arrow just did Batman stories with the arrow family.
@@RickReasonnzshit the main villian for half the dam thing was the league of assassin they even took the whole Raj wanting Bruce to be his replacement and shoved it onto Green arrow.
They didn't give him that title until season 4, if I recall correctly. They call him The Hood throughout season 1, and in seasons 2 and 3, his name is just The Arrow. When they finally start calling him Green Arrow, a character on the Flash even makes fun of it by saying adding a color is lame.
This is only a small issue that speaks to a general distaste for Oliver being a superhero at all. In season 1, Oliver's modus operandi was murdering the rich people doing shady stuff his dad told him about. He's a serial killer who incidentally fights other criminals because they get in the way of his serial killing. They acknowledge this explicitly in season 2, where Oliver says his whole campaign in the first season was a fool's errand that didn't stop the bad guy and ended with his best friend being killed. Season 5 brings that back up again by making the central villain a guy looking for revenge against Oliver for murdering his dad in season 1. The series seemed aware that its main superhero wasn't doing much superheroing and tried to course correct for years without addressing the central issue that its superhero show didn't really want to be a superhero show.
@@ActuallySatan I have mixed feelings about the CW DC shows, like everyone else- but they could've at least called him the Green Arrow! I remember the Season 2 Arrow and Flash crossover felt awesome at first, but looking back on it, I was clearly just starved for superheroes at least acting like superheroes.
Worth noting that Neil Gaiman discusses the topic you mentioned, making worlds feel more real and populated, in his Master Class and it’s worth a listen. So often it feels like these CBM franchises are just very pretty facades on top of otherwise hollow and empty storefronts. Gaiman mentioned that even small details help alleviate this problem, giving the illusion of depth that answers people’s questions about the setting and raises newer, interesting questions that don’t necessarily need answering.
Gaiman and J micheal Strazinski are both good at doing deep world building behind the scenes.
There is this MCU fanfiction that i love, and i have never been able to figure out why because it has nearly all the bad fanfiction tropes, but i think i see now that what it does have is stuff like the Avengers doing humanitarian aid after natural disasters and Captain America jogging through new York looking for muggers to stop and old ladies to help across the street.
Tropes aren't bad necessarily... whats the fic?
It's important to note that, in Iron Man 3, Tony wasn't sitting on the couch drinking martinis. The whole point of that scene was that he wasn't. Pepper comes home to an Iron Man drone sitting on the couch, with Tony speaking through it, while the actual person is down in the basement working on more and more Iron Man stuff. His arc in that movie is grappling with his existential crisis, and reconciling his various goals (normal-ish life vs. saving/protecting the world) to varying degrees of success.
That scene is right after he challenged the Ten Rings, and is right before they blow up his house. It could be read as Tony distancing himself from reality: the reality of his actions having consequences; the reality of his relationships needing real effort; the reality of his mortality, which he's forced to confront throughout; and the reality that his life has changed in ways beyond his control.
Compare the scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming, in which Tony sends a drone to talk to Peter. That scene does have Tony at a party, and Peter is heavily discouraged when he realizes that. The drone is effectively a billion-dollar phone, albeit one that could've helped him in a fight (iirc it also saves him from a fall, so it's not like Tony did nothing for him; it's more that Peter's disappointed his mentor can't or won't give him the full attention and assistance he wants/needs). This scene also builds in the later scene where Peter yells at Tony for sending another drone, only for the latter to step out of the Iron Man suit and reveal he actually came this time. If his use of drones represents his separation from reality, or his attempts to distance himself from such, then the second scene shows how important Peter is (which is debatable, but the contrast between the two scenes certainly heightens the significance, if just slightly)
Yup. IM3 is all about how Tony had become *nothing but the suit* in an attempt to put armor on his emotions. It is a criticism of Red's entire take and she doesn't respond well because it's too sad for her fun cartoon shenanigans.
@@Duiker36 Not to mention Tony went through the other side of the wormhole (that's about to collapse) at a point in space billions of lightyears away from Earth and all life-sustaining functions in the suit are about to fail.
Tony almost died.
And if that's not enough, the idea of Thanos is planted into his head when he saw a glimpse of something bigger on the horizon that will come back.
So yeah, Iron Man 3 is about Tony's PTSD and constant need to invent and create to save and protect everyone, and prepare for the oncoming threat. He comes up with 35+ suit models for various functions and situations but never perfects them because he's constantly moving onto the next idea. He inserts sensors into his body so he can a summon a suit immediately OR direct a suit to form around a loved one (and the suits' first directive is to protect a loved one because they're responding to Tony's nightmares!) Speaking of which, Tony isn't sleeping well because of his PTSD or not sleeping enough because he's busy inventing new suits.
@@Duiker36while I agree with some of their takes here,
The one that seemed to go against what they usually want, which is a coherent story is, if Tony tries to find a solution for their to be a world that doesn’t need super heroes, and by the way, he nearly did, doesn’t that mean the world doesn’t need iron man in the normal sense?
In fact, we see this in civil war, with how he plays a more behind the scenes role. He’s not out there fighting.
And then this need to retire is shown in endgame, as even with the world in shambles, he doesn’t do much. But it’s only when he realises he should be turns back to being iron man, because iron man is for these things.
It’s like how Spider-Man is for the friendly neighbourhood. They both have different goals in heroism.
Like how cops don’t stop fires, but they do aid in preventing more people getting hurt by blocking of roads and redirecting. The fire is dealt by firefighters.
The Spiderverse films do a really good job of this too. They both have their big plots going on, but both films have the introduction montages where all the Spider-people say that they spend most of their time dealing with their friendly neighbourhood crime, but we also get little glimpses of Miles and the others just thwarting crime because that's what they do.
I think the thing with the whole power responsability thing in the MCU is that it represents a different lesson than it normally does. Because it normally means "if you have the power to do good, you can't look away, you can't let the bad things happen". But MCU's Peter already, knew that lesson from the beggining. But the lesson in NWH, is a different, maybe even more important one. "Even if you do good, bad things *will* happen, and you will suffer, and you will suffer losses. But you have to keep doing good. Because it's the right thing to do."
I dunno, it just feels like she should have done a different speech and give Peter issues with the latter throughout the MCU, allowing May to give him a speech that he can actually learn from.
Its interesting that in that first Iron Man movie, Obediah inadvertently created the hero by trying to have Tony murdered so he could become CEO.
In much the same way, Erskine only fled the Nazis and found Steve because Schmidt gave him a hard push. It's more indirect, but it's there.
Even when he steals Tony's tech, he never becomes "Iron Man" because he's under the impression that making the suit bigger, have more fire power, and...designed by someone else instead of doing it himself, makes him the "more advanced Iron Man in every way."
Until Tony asks: "How'd you solve the icing problem?"
Tony may be flawed but he always learns from his mistakes. You see it every film he's in. I have no doubt Obeidah, if he didn't die in the first film, would never learn.
@@Duiker36Thor only became a hero because Loki tricked him into fighting the Frost Giants and getting himself banished to Earth.
Bruce Banner only created the Hulk after failing to receate the super soldier serum under orders of General Ross.
Black Widow was literally created and trained by Ivan Dreykov.
Hawkeye is the only one of the original Avengers to not have been created by a villain, because he has no villains.
@@maninthetrenchcoat5603 I haven't seen his tv show. Does he even have a backstory?
First Hawkeye does not have a backstory. Second Hawkeye is inspired by first Hawkeye. This is because that show is legitimately about the chaos of multiple forces that for some reason center on a thing Kate holds and first Hawkeye for some reason.
This exact thing is part of why I enjoyed the new DnD movie so much; stuff is /happening/ all around them, we're just only focusing on them. Commerce is happening, conflicts over land are going on, Xenk is off being the paladin's paladin (except for a brief stint in our story), other adventuring parties are seen! Basically, the world feels full & alive and you can believe it exists & stuff is happening outside of the frame of the particular story we're currently following.
The MCU lives in a weird, uncharted limbo between the serializations of television and the definitive resolutions of motion pictures. I forgot who said it, but a TV show is a question (that is asked every week) and a movie is an answer (to a question that can usually only be asked once). Since the overarching story never really ends in comics, comic book movies always start off on the back foot.
It's interesting to me that the Japan of My Hero Academia is basically the system Tony Stark and Shield wanted in Civil War. The licensing, the regulations, the Public Safety Commission overseeing everything - it's a flawed system, of course, but Deku and company are growing up in the world the Pro-Reg side wanted to create.
In a lot of ways, MHA’s system is the logical consequence of blending the superhero genre with the Shonen Jump formula. Shonen manga almost always provides the heroes with a system to excel within rather than having them be fully self-motivated vigilantes like the superhero genre defaults to. You could probably extrapolate a lot about Japanese society, the parallels to the idol industry and the pro-establishment position of major publishers like Shueisha, but from a storytelling perspective, placing your heroes within a system does also provide a lot of tools for the writer. You can have clearly defined goals for the heroes (“I wanna be Hokage/The No. 1 Hero”), you can have a multitude of mentors within the system, you can have quantifiable power levels and advancements, you can have the all-important tournament arc, and you can have more powerful characters providing justified protection for the heroes while they are in the early phases of their development. Even One Piece, probably the most anti-establishment major shonen manga, does this in a roundabout way by making the antagonists provide that system
It's neat because Horikoshi obviously put thought into the setting. Supers have been around for IIRC like 200 years? There's no way that the world wouldn't have devised systems to deal with them. Registration being contentious is actually even a plot point in later seasons! He's obviously a huge fan of comics, and basically asked "What would Metropolis look like in 200 years?"
@@CanonessEllinorside note but this is even more interesting when fanfic of other media do general superhero aus, because they’re obviously influenced by mha but often in way that seems purely unconscious. Combine that with classic mcu fics like the “everyone hanging out in avengers tower” and you get the funniest sub genres of “heros all live in a tower and their powers are ranked and regulated” and then you get people writing “yeah and that system is bad” aus in response.
It’s honestly fascinating how superhero aus become their own weird thing with their own tropes that don’t fit traditional western superhero tropes well, mostly I think because of young people who have been so influence by the mcu and shonen superhero stuff that they don’t have media where superheroes are being classically friendly neighbourhood to reference.
It creates some super funny holes in the worldbuilding too (who cares about that stuff in fanfic but from an analysis level it’s certainly interesting). Like the death of origin stories means the charcaters in these aus are seemingly born with their powers too.
@@CanonessEllinor Don't forget having an established system also means you can have a sort of norm for heroes, meaning you can have the "this is a standard situation you'll face in your career, if you can't handle this I'm sorry but this job just isn't for you" situations at the start with the "Oh shit this situation effectively breaks our system, uhhhhhhhhhh, good luck" ones near the end which can be really good for a linear story, if a bit incongruous with traditional western superhero media.
Plus it means that you can have your supes have designated days off where they don't need to angst as much about taking care of their personal life for once because they aren't the literal only one in between regular people and catastrophe most days of the week, and I think its always nice to see doing heroic things not ruin people's lives.
Japanese manga and anime approaches it better than Marvel did with Civil War. Americans just believe it's about selling out to the Man and endangering the ones you love.
25:00 This is touched on in an episode of Batman: TAS - S2E3, District Attorney Janet van Dorn is kidnapped by Batman's rouges gallery and forced to defend a captured Batman in a kangaroo trial. As a result of the chaotic proceedings, Janet declares in summation that Batman was the response to the villain's existence - "If anything, YOU created HIM!"
One of my favourite episodes
I love how many versions of batman touch on this. Including the 2022 version where he realizes it's not enough to just beat up the bad guys and call it a night, (cause that's how psychos like the riddler get the wrong idea) He has to be a symbol of hope for people.
Whereas in the animated series Janet lays it out plain and simple: "sure the gimmicks may be different, but even without batman you would all be out there- one way or another- bringing misery to Gotham". She calls it like it is, that everyone in Arkham would have snapped at one point or another.
I was thinking about the Batman the Animated Series while watching this too! I always enjoyed how Bruce Wayne worked to better Gotham in multiple ways, many of his early episodes were about helping charities and the disadvantaged.
Actually the Shadow began in pulp magazines. The radio adaptations came later and shrunk the Shadow’s multiple identities to one, gave that identity a girlfriend, and made him considerably less bloodthirsty. It was the radio show as well that gave him the “power to cloud men’s mind” not a power he had in the literary incarnation.
So the Shadow wasn't just the inspiration for Batman (alongside Zorro). But he was also basically a proto-Moon Knight. The OG version sounds so much cooler than the Alec Baldwin flick 😂.
I interpret Aunt May giving the speech a bit differently. May was dieing from Peter trying to save people. She knows how Peter will take this and wants to avert some of that pain by affirming that this was the right thing to do. Even with this outcome, May still thinks they should have done it.
On first viewing, I assumed that she said it as a reminder of Ben's words and why Peter's doing any of this. Kinda agree that it would've hit harder from the other 2 spidermen though
I think "My Adventures with Superman" is actually starting this out pretty OK, spoilers for those who didn't watch yet. But the first episode is about Clark Kent trying to be "normal" as in not using the powers he knows he has so far. He messes up, breaks his alarm trying to hit snooze, on his way to his internship at the Daily Planet, he rescues a cat from a tree, and then just mutters that he HAD to do that, what else could he do?
This is a guy who isn't setting out to be a hero, but becomes one due to how he is, whether nature or nurture. He's the guy who rescues kittens without a second thought and only then tries to justify it to himself. Like he can't help helping people.
And once he dons the suit, he just accepts that this is his role.
I couldn't get past episode 6 of MAWS because of how badly Lois gets butchered.
It's like a trend in media these days for someone to do completely horrific, out of pocket shit, and yet it's the other person who ends up having to apologize. Not them.
It was most egregious in the Barbie movie, but in MAWS Lois has her own version of it where the conflict is just brushed under the rug and everyone's happy... but she never said the word "sorry" even once.
It's like with Ken, how it seems eerily apparent the writers don't think either of them did anything that warrants an apology-which is so delusional it's scary.
At least with the Barbie movie them not writing in a Ken apology is blatant misogyny! What was going on with MAWS? There's no such convenient explanation for completely toxic writing.
@@baydiac oh god you're one of those people. Cry harder. Its just a story!
@@MrDeathmaster131 Oh noooooo, I feel so insulteddddd, whatever will I dooooo. How could I _possibly_ allow you to think that I care about toxic relationship dynamics (platonic and otherwise) being treated like they’re wholesome and totally fine in pop culture?
How could I let you think that I think SAYING SORRY is a necessary part of conflict resolution? I’m such a pansy snowflake for thinking people should apologize to each other, I’m soooooo ashameddddd.
@@baydiac what did Lois do
@@baydiacHate to break it to you, but getting a blatant sorry out of Lois that's also not partially fueled by in-moment worry *is* what would be out of character for Lois, based on how she's been characterized for decades.
Her whole personality when it comes to her choices essentially is "no need to ask for permission or forgiveness, because doing either isn't gonna stop the thing from getting done". And yeah, she will occasionally admit when she's been wrong or unfair, but it's also again on occasion and mostly when she's been blatantly in the wrong.
Also, just because we didn't see it doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen. Things don't explicitly have to happen onscreen for them to have taken place, and it's pretty functionally implied that apologies and relationship patching already happened off-acreen by the next episode, when they're not dealing with the initial ball of emotions of their arguments or adrenaline rush of almost dying a little bit before.
Just because that's not how you would have written the Lois of the story, doesn't mean Lois is broken from how she's always foundationally been.
_Lost Boys_ is a classic that introduces the worldwide vampire problem and the grandpa's reason for being the secret protagonist _in the last line of dialogue._
36:40
The scene where Tony yeets himself into a wall while testing the rocket boots ALWAYS cracks me up!
The concept of a modern Phantom adaptation where he's leading a weirdly personal crusade against digital piracy is a laugh riot.
I'm picturing him as a not-so-supervillain punching the clock for a desk job in a cubicle to collate lists of IP's & email addresses for their corporate overlord.
@@dracos24 I could see it as a gag where he's fighting actual modern day pirates and is explaining his oath, and someone goes "Oh, like people torrenting movies?" And he just goes 🤨"...no? I mean people who attack ships at sea, kill the people on board and steal their stuff."
@@snorpenbass4196There are actually plenty of refugees he could rescue on the seas that come under attack by pirates in the modern day, so the oath holds. He just needs to reinforce the purple condom suit against sub-machine guns and assault rifles.
of course, that same panel establishes he crusades against *greed*, and uh...not a lack of targets to hit there. a modern-day Phantom could basically be Eliot Spencer, whether on his own or as part of a whole Leverage crew made up entirely of early superheroes.
@@HeyLookASquirrl I suddenly want to see this very badly.
The Discworld series is very good at making it clear that characters that are not the protagonist of the book you are currently reading do have their own interesting and meaningful lives.
The City Watch books also always have the members of the Watch DOING things - ensuring crimes get dealt with, public service, helping the citizens… in no small part because each book also shows the Watch evolving, by hiring more Watchmen, or establishing new departments, or cleaning up new issues that started between Anhk-Morphork and others cities.
"I contain multitudes but a lot of them are superhero comics." Red, I hope you know that I'm just going to use that every day from now on.
1:17:40 The fact the idea of canon events as a hinderance to modern superhero movies comes up in this conversation honestly made me appreciate Spiderverse even more
As much as the Aunt May death scene is weird within No Way Home itself, I think it inadvertently helped set the stage for AtSV. That scene does give the feeling that a canon event is being enforced even when it doesn’t need to be, and the weird feeling paved the way for a feeling of “no that’s bullshit” when Miles can’t save his dad
@@stwbmc98 I disagree that it was just a checklist item. The point of the story was to have his heroic life start having real, lasting consequences on his status quo. A loved one dying from it was the natural conclusion of that point, and it set the stage for a crucial conflict for a hero: it's easy for a hero to do "heroic" stuff when it's what they want to do, but how do they cope when their heroic principles tell them one thing when they really personally want to do something else, typically something very "unheroic"?
Superman's day off helps show something I love about superheroes, and is an excellent illustration of what MJ meant in her "anyone can wear the mask" speech.
I know it’s unlikely, but Red has reminded me why I love superheroes and especially Superman. I’d love to see Red cover the new Superman Series.
She has been informed that Silver Banshee looks suspiciously a lot like her avatar, just with sleeves and different color hair.
@@aros0018what no she *looks it up* oh yeah true true
I do like Vison's statement that "Their [the various MCU supers] very existence invites challenge."
I think what people miss is it is that selfsame challenge that invited the heroes too. So yeah, while a super's existence might invite challenge, their absence would not remove the challenge.
Vision's statement and reasoning doesn't take into account that the sequence of events that led to the creation of the Avengers was begun a thousand years ago when Odin left the Tesseract/space stone on a earth for 'safe keeping'. It's finding the Tesseract that allows HYDRA to create the weapons that necessitate Progect Rebirth and the creation of Super Soilders. The Tesseract is what brought Mar'vel and the Skrulls to Earth; Carol Danvers getting her powers and Nick Fury beginning the Avengers Initiative. The chain of events culminats with Thanos sending Loki to Earth and the battle of New York. Iron Man was the first MCU film released, but Tony announcing himself as Iron Man did NOT begin the chain of events.
Odin deciding to bury an Infinity stone in his 'backyard' is what started the snowball rolling.
Everything is either a direct consequence if the Tesseract being on Earth or pre-dated Tony developing the Iron Man armor. Anton Venko: pissed at Tony's dad. Eldrich Killian and AIM? Pissed at Tony from pre-Iron Man douchebaggery. SHIELD was HYDRAs beard before Tony was born. Accidently create a murderous AI? Result of messing with space rock/Infinity stone brought to Earth by Loki while attempting to get another infinity stone.
Once again, I feel like both of the Spiderverse movies are able to avoid this problem with superhero stories. Even though Miles is figuring things out, it's clear that the world around him needs a Spiderman and someone has to step up. Then the second movie shows us that every world that exists will always need a Spiderman
It’s fascinating that JJBA effectively fixes this by involving destiny and a rotating cast. Good guys exist to beat bad guys and don’t need to be superheros once they have won.
And when a JoJo shows up later, often they clearly haven't gone from strength to strength. Jotaro turns out to be a pretty crummy dad, Joseph just really goes downhill as he ages - it's sad, but it does feel very real. It's not just "Oh you used to do the cool thing where you guess people's next line, that makes you a superhero forever"
@loadeddice4696 After part 3, Jotaro literally doesn't use Time Stop at all until part 4. He's just vibing with his family. Not, you know, WELL but he's sure with his family.
Well said. Saving the world once or twice doesnt define your whole existence.
And also, the villains that exist are characters that can only be handled by people with JoJo skill sets and abilities, or (as the case in part 3) the VILLAIN makes the heroes
the thing is, they're not heroes necessarily
Maybe you could call Jonathan one, he's there because of vampire threat. but Dio essentially makes him
Joseph... his godfather gets kidnapped and vampires attack him, otherwise he's not exactly heroing
Jotaro's initial motive is to save his mom and that's all, eventually he does start working with speedwagon because he *knows* Dio is still a threat even after death. Dio also essentially creates Jotaro
but then part 4: high schoolers dealing with a serial killer...
part 5: a literal crimelord, gangsta
part 6: Jolyne's motive is to get free then save her father
It’s Friday. Red is talking about superheroes for 2 hours. Life is good.
Two hours? *Checks* oh yeah. Oh yeah 😊
@@mirjanboumaI got time 😎
hearing red call them "the moonknight system" gave me an ungodly amount of serotonin
I'm glad Aquaman was considered a good example here because he was saving people and dealing with a real problem outside of himself, there just weren't as many humans involved as you usually expect. Those freaky crab people at the bottom of the ocean needed a hero, and Aquaman was there to save the day.
You know it's a good detail diatribe when Red has figured something out about her opinions on media
I love that you have figured this out. It's mind-blowing that these worlds have built franchises and yet the world building is lacking a human care. That's the thinking that will keep us human writers prevalent when AI takes over
The out-of-character-ness of Civil War was so reviled that Tony Stark spent YEARS getting the stuffing knocked out of him by every other writer in every other series to pay for his sins.
I wanted to mention a chapter of the batfam webtoon (it's really good go read it). Upon learning that Alfred is alone for the holidays, the entire batfam goes "shit, ok I'll try to finish this and get back asap". It's so heartwarming!
I second this endorsement! It's great and wholesome AF and good at giving you either the giggles, the feels, or both.
One thing that came to mind (which you guys pretty much say) is the difference between ongoing problems and immediate problems. Of all places, I saw this dichotomy in the Fate Core Rulebook. Ongoing problems are things the heroes need to fix (or continually work to fix) where immediate problems are usually threats that the heroes need to stop on a time limit. The former makes the hero the active party, where the latter makes the hero the reactive (or even passive) party.
When it comes to Spiderman in the MCU, I stand by a theory that Uncle Ben wasn't impactful for Peter like the other movies. His inciting event to become a superhero was that he lives in a world with superheroes. Then he finds that responsibility in the Uncle Ben moment of No Way Home.
Yep. AFAIK they don't say exactly when Uncle Ben dies, but it had to have been fairly recent to Homecoming as Pete implies May is still grieving to some degree. But notice he talks about how much SHE's gone through, and not really including himself in that.
In the MCU Pete gets his powers at 14. His talk with Tony about having to act because he can always struck me as the precursor to the Great Power line. It's the still-fuzzy thought you have in your head that crystallizes when some one sums it up perfectly.
There is literally no way he learned the Great Power line before his talk with Tony. If he had that's what he would have said.
Literally the two reasons Superheroes can ARGUABLY be summarized in the iconic Spiderman quote.
With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility.
Unless the premise of a film or piece is simply "The world is average but this random guy got super powers" (which if written well could prove quite a comedy), then why would someone acquire superpowers if there is no need for it?
Also, regarding the "Retiring Superheroes" thing. I think it at least worked in Endgame as Steve gave the Shield to Sam, and didnt just leave the mantle hanging. He had been through a LOT, and had a chance to get his happy ending with Peggy AND not leave his role as Captain America, to rot.
As opposed to other cases where the hero retires but nobody inherits the role.
There's kinda elements of that in Shazam, where Billy gets superpowers but all he can do with them is charge people's phones. But I'd absolutely enjoy a full story about a superhero who just doesn't have a supervillain and never encounters any crimes he's able to solve.
I prefer the Dreadnought approach to that thing, in Dreadnought, a novel about a trans superhero, there's tons of people with powers in the town, but only a handful of superheroes. And when Dreadnought, who's just starting the business asks why, one of the superheroes describe to her how horrible the life of superhero can be, they can put their family in danger, they'll have no respite, etc... In the end, if people want to do good, they become firefighters or policemen, or, as most do, they just live normal life, and do good sometimes.
But only true heroes would try to live like superheroesd risk their lives and mental health at this point...
This is honestly a lot of what makes JoJo Part 2-4 entertaining to me. The world is normal outside of the secret bullshit being experienced by the characters. Part 4 does it the best, where it’s a normal town with normal town problems, there’s just some crazy people granting superpower ghosts because a couple of bored young men said fuck it, let’s just shoot things with a magic arrow, surely nothing will go wrong.
Additional note on the Civil War event- while it was going on, the cosmic/space character were busy dealing with their OWN massive crossover event called Annihilation. Absolutely spectacular series that I would recommend checking out, mostly categorized by significantly less big dumb idiot moments, and significantly more big giant alien moments.
The sherlock Holmes fans fixating on Moriarty and Adler is interesting. Because it contrasts with my experiences. I'd only ever read the original stories and when BBC sherlock came out I 100% thought they were new characters invented for the show. I'd literally forgotten they existed at all.
Further note on the Civil War in the MCU. There is very little coverage of how the general population reacts to the Sokovia Accords. We get one girl talking shit to Tony and a lot of police after Bucky, but we dont see what the population thinks of the Avengers. It adds to the feeling like the world is just as big as that parking lot. No civilians, no crime, just action figures smacking into each other.
At this point, absolutely all of my knowledge of comics come from this channel (Never really watched or read them). How passionately you both talk about it makes it sound really great, so much that I watch your videos about it when it couldn't be farther from what I usually read/watch
Blue just lowkey graduated hbomberguy to hbomberman, proving the point he was making about escalation 😂
Getting to the No Way Home diatribe, I liked the other spider-men sort of laying it out that the life of the spider man is one of sacrifice. Toby is older and has learned the hard lessons. Andrew paid the price big time with the death of Gwen Stacey. Tom...hasn't really done that. He's faced world ending threats, but they weren't personal. He's faced local and deadly threats, but it hadn't come for his home...yet. No Way Home lays out that he's not Stark. He doesn't have vast resources to protect his personal life (not that this even protects Stark all that much). The stuff he does leads to danger for those around him. So in the end he becomes the local web head dealing with street-level crime, with no backing, and no one to lean on as Peter. Of all the Avengers, he doesn't have anything outside the job.
To be fair, Tony was the biggest prevention of Tony's resources protecting his personal life; "Hey dumbasses, here's my home address, come and get me" is not gonna make his security's job easier. (Also, he didn't think to install any defensive systems in his house that didn't require putting them on? Such a Sooooper Genius.)
@@Sephiroth144Tony Stark's biggest antagonist is his own arrogance.
It's a shame you don't mention the x-men movies, because they're pretty good at showing that "the world is the problem, they're struggling to live" they're not perfect movies, but the world is far from empty, it's actively and openly hostile to the heroes.
In The Batman, I loved the way that they showed the different methods he used to get into the night club in order to highlight the theme.
The first time, he's vengeance Batman only.
The second time, he's Bruce Wayne only.
The third time he's both.
I love the journey of self integration.
For me, No Way Home doing the Great Power/Responsibility speech with Aunt May recontextualized this version of Peter Parker as one who would have been a hero even if Ben didn't die.
I know that sounds ridiculous because Peter is a good hearted person and would always want to help people, but I feel it important to note that he typically goes to stop crime for the FIRST time BECAUSE of revenge and stopping/killing the guy who killed Ben.
Especially when the Remi and TASM spiderman have different levels of that where Remi KILLS the guy(and then has to have Aunt May explain why thats not good) and TASM realizes the importance to save civilians before he ever finds the crook.
So to me, MCU Peter is the end of the spectrum of having NO motivation for revenge when originally becoming Spiderman. And it makes sense that HIS lesson of power and responsibility is actually about if its:
"not my r e s p o n s i b i l i t y to save the villains"
Originally Peter started as a selfish red pilled incel. His motivation was guilt but doing the right thing and interacting with other people eventually made him a better person.
As @dradencake3199 said: MCU Peter Parker is more intrinsically altruistic. He starts being Spider-Man because he got super powers and feels that's his responsibility to help others; because, he can. This is what he tells Tony Stark in Civil War. Making him the ultimate Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. It's only after Stark gets him involved with Avengers stuff thar Peter feels/thinks he should do even more and runs afowl of The Vulture.
6:20 tbf the reason Irene Adler is a fan favourite despite being in only one sherlock story is that she beats sherlock
And unfortunately is the only female character that is a client.
Irene Adler is amazing but so many studios only see the chance to make a love interest to Sherlock
1:22:20 This comic honestly does such an amazing job of making the reader feel exactly what it should, what superman feels for humanity, HOPE. It makes you feel like the world CAN succeed without Superman, but right now it just needs his example more than anything, they just don't know it yet.
Superman is Hope, Wonder Woman is Truth, and Batman is Justice.