#I LOVE Carol but if Marvel gives me a dumb lesbian that doesn’t know how to balance family life and work life | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

popanalysis99 · 3 years

Text

Toxic Men in TV Series who are the absolute worst.

(TW: R*pe and Sexual Assault)

While there are some men who seem to be interesting, let’s not deny the fact that there are most male characters who act like their “toxicity” is cool but honestly, it’s horrible and something not to root for. So here are the toxic male characters who are the absolute worst, excuse my misandry:

Kevin McRoberts - Kevin Can F**k Himself

We had to start somewhere from the bottom of the underworld. A recent entry on this list, Kevin is the lead character Allison’s husband who...let’s just say has the brain of a dumb frat bro who is extremely high on pot and hasn’t recovered since then. While most of the sitcoms in the past would portray these so-called goofy and dim-witted husbands as “big fun” and lovable, Kevin is not like that, at all. In this anti-sitcom nightmare, Kevin literally believes that the whole world revolves around him. He plans such stupid unrealistic schemes to seize the day, recklessly spends the savings on stupid irrelevant sports merchandises and doesn’t even let Allison have her own agency outside of his life. Plus he is so petty and spiteful to the point he destroys one good thing that any of the women in the series have, like Allison’s dream job and Patty’s love life. And that latter was because she didn’t bring him a burger! All of this makes him look less funny and more tyrannical. No wonder poor Allison got spurred into wanting to kill him.

Ross Geller - Friends

Ross may seemed like a “nice guy”, but let’s just agree it was a facade. Ross believes that he knows what’s best for the women he dates in the series and thinks he is superior and is always right about everything. He is seems extremely disturbed over the fact that his ex-wife, Carol is a lesbian and is jilted towards her current wife, Susan and snarks at the latter for it. And then there is her extreme control and jealousy towards Rachel, especially in her career. While Rachel is no saint either, Ross jumps to the conclusion that the man who got her a perfect job wants to sleep with her, then goes out of his way to humiliate and mark his territory on her and even if it’s revealed that the said guy has a girlfriend of his own, Ross still doesn’t abandon his theory, unless he believes that the guy is cheating on his girlfriend with Rachel. And then there is the fact that he joined his student girlfriend on a spring break just to have her all to himself, not caring about the fact that what if one of his students or colleagues would’ve seen him on TV with her and that could’ve put him in a huge scrutiny.

Joe Goldberg - You

The show is basically built around how toxic Joe is, but this didn’t stop him from having his own fanbase apparently, with most of them glossing over his actions. But Joe is not a dream boyfriend at all. Once he sees a woman in front of him, he immediately gets obsessed with her and believes she belongs to him and him only. And to achieve that, he stalks her, he checks everything about her, kills people he believes are harmful to her when he himself is the same and when the woman finds out about him and rejects him, he kidnaps and kills her and the cycle begins again.

Chuck Bass - Gossip Girl

What is it with the teen drama industry’s obsession with the “Bad Boy who can be redeemed with love” trope? Chuck Bass is “the bad boy” of Gossip Girl. If his attempted rape of Serena and Jenny didn’t give fans an indication that how deranged he is, his violent and emotional abuse of his girlfriend Blair cements him as this. He slut-shamed women around him, hit Blair once and even traded her for a hotel ownership and somehow he gets a happy ending with her at the end! What?

Nate Jacobs - Euphoria

Nate is a star quarterback of his high school football team and seems like he has it all, but underneath, he is fucking deranged. His untamed manly rage causes him to physically and emotionally abuse his girlfriend Maddy and blackmail Jules, who didn’t do anything wrong but just sleep with his father, which makes me think that Nate is blackmailing her into lying to the cops about his assault on Maddy when she wasn’t even there when it happened just because it’s fun for him. Honestly, I’d like to see the imagine Rue and Jules had of killing him become a reality someday.

Dawson Leery - Dawson’s Creek

Just because the show is named after him since he is the protagonist, doesn’t justify his actions. Dawson sees himself as some sort of a Nice Guy hero who believes he is entitled to everything. He has this extreme view on women and how they should fulfil his fantasies of his Rom-Com world. He is extremely critical of Jen when he finds out about her promiscuous past and tells her that she should be ashamed of herself for it, and gets jealous when his two best friends Joey and Pacey begin dating. And when he was briefly in the movie business, he was a rookie but was already a primadonna with the director and crew of the movie was working on and insulted a film critic for criticising his movie which was actually bad.

Kilgrave - Jessica Jones

Kilgrave is the main villain of the Marvel-Netflix series Jessica Jones. He becomes obsessed with the titular heroine when she breaks off from his mind-control. Before that, he spent years treating her as his sex slave and raping her constantly, which left her traumatised. He begins to stalker and believe it will be a “lover’s reunion” when he will see her again someday. He manipulates and brainwashes everyone around him to his whim and treats most women as objects but despite all that, sees himself as the good guy of the situation. Even after Jessica finally gives him his just desserts, he still haunts her everyday.

Fernando Vera - Mr. Robot

This spawn of satan is the reason why I decided to write this list in the first place. Where do I even start? He is first introduced into the series when he forces Shayla to go on a date with her and later rape her. This is what causes the misandrist vigilante Elliot to sell him out to the FBI and this apparently turns on Vera and moves his unhealthy obsession to Elliot. He has Shayla killed when he tricks Elliot into breaking him out of prison, then returns to have him all to himself by kidnapping his therapist Krista and forcing information out of her about Elliot so that he could “break him and build him back up”, like a fucked up version of The Taming Of The Shrew. He psychologically abuses Elliot into remembering being sexually abused by his father as a child and proceeds to gaslight him into thinking that he was just helping him. The huge problem with Vera is that he sees himself as some sort of Christian Grey who believes that his abuse towards both Shayla and Elliot is charming. Whenever someone failed his desires, he immediately gets bored of them and moves onto someone else, like when he got Shayla killed and moved onto Elliot. That’s why it felt so cathartic when Krista killed him.

Tate Langdon - American Horror Story

Apparently, he is Tate Langdon and he is...hot?? While most of the AHS fans glorified him due to his emo bad boy nature, let’s not forget the fact that he was a school shooter who murdered innocent students and staff and was in general possessive and toxic towards Violet. So no way he is boyfriend material!

Don Draper - Mad Men

Don Draper was the main protagonist of Mad Men. He was an advertisement and marketing executive who had a lot of vices and did a lot of horrible things such as cheat on his wife and treat almost every women and colleagues like crap.

Dexter Morgan - Dexter

While Dexter might seem like the serial-killer killer, there are a lot of things about him which are unadmirable. He gaslights those he is close to so that they could get off his back, obstructs evidence pointing out to him, captures those who didn’t even fit his victims like Doakes and caused the deaths of LaGuerta, Rita and finally his sister Debra. Yeah I think you should stay away from him.

Walter White - Breaking Bad

Aaah..the worst of the worst. Walter White is the protagonist of the series Breaking Bad. He first starts off as a pushover high school teacher who isn’t respected by anyone. When he gets diagnosed with Lung Cancer, he gets into the meth business so that he could support his family, but we all know that it’s not true. He relishes on the power and glory from being a drug dealer and then kingpin and because of that he ends up abusing both Jesse and Skyler, emotionally abusing and selling out the former to the sadistic Nazis and raping the latter several times. He is so petty and spiteful that he kills anyone insulting his ego, just ask Mike. And even after all this, he still claims that it’s all for his family. Like what?

110 notes · View notes

batmanisagatewaydrug · 4 years

Text

definitive VERY SERIOUS ranking of MCU characters, best to trash

Gamora and Nebula - tied for first place because prickly, traumatized assassin women? that’s my shit. prickly, traumatized assassin women working through their issues TOGETHER and growing closer as sisters? YEAH, babey! that’s the shit! I love them and they deserved arcs that loved them, too. biggest injustice in the MCU.

Thor - absolutely excellent. amazing work. distinguished slut vibes and a radiant beam on sunshine in this shithole world. again, never saw Endgame, but he deserved better.

Sam Wilson - going strong since 2014, babey. just an all-around great guy, good for him finally getting his own show. will I be watching it? absolutely not. not a force on god’s green earth could make me care enough to pirate a marvel television show in this the year of our lord and savior 2020, even if he is a very cool dude with wings.

Bucky Barnes - all the fun of Steve but no moral quandaries because everything bad that he did happened when he was being controlled by nazis and he feels really bad about it uwu

Peter Parker - yes OBVIOUSLY the movies did Peter dirty, we’ve all seen a fucking essay about it, making him Iron Man Jr was wack and being poor doesn’t look like that, but he’s cute and fun and I like Tom Holland, who was the emotional anchor who forced me to keep giving a sliver of a shit during Infinity War. Far From Home was pretty not good but would I see another Spider-Man movie? fuck, maybe.

Steve Rogers - idk I just think he’s neat. really love how he’s shaped like a dorito and hates nazis.

James Rhodes - I don’t think Rhodey’s ever said or done anything that wasn’t iconic and for that he deserves to be exactly one spot above his idiot best friend.

Tony Stark - I hold possibly the most unpopular opinion on Tony Stark on this entire hellsite, which is that he’s just fine. he’s fun sometimes, he’s irritating sometimes, he made some points during Civil War. he should probably lose more points for being a former war profiteer but if I started digging into comic book logic too much I’d have to change my url because Batman cooperates with cops and endangers children, so idk.

T’Challa - I don’t remember a TON about T’Challa’s actual personality because it’s been like 4 years since Black Panther came out and he had like 2 lines in Infinity War, but he’s a powerful nerd/jock multiclasser who spends most of his time surrounded by women who are very smart and dangerous and much cooler than him and I really respect that.

Natasha Romanoff - Natasha is difficult to rank because for a long time her dominant defining characteristic was being The Girl One, which means she has a different personality in pretty much every movie, and it was never interesting. if Marvel had rubbed two brain cells together and given her a solo movie between 2012 and 2015 she might have fared better, but alas. press F in the chat for Nat’s potential.

Groot, Rocket, Drax, Mantis - I love these funky socially incompetent aliens. more of them, please.

Bruce Banner - only interesting in Ragnarok when he’s Thor’s anxious comedic foil and boyfriend; thank you for that small gift, Taika. I never saw Endgame because I love myself, so I don’t know anything about professor Hulk and I don’t want to.

Peter Quill - fun in theory but loses points for being such a painful walking embodiment of the extremely heterosexual “idiot manchild gets hot competent gf by virtue of being white cishet protagonist man.” shut the fuck up she’s way too good for him.

Wanda Maximoff - despite all of Joss Whedon’s best efforts I really liked her in Age of Ultron and then my love for her just decreased with each subsequent appearance. like Natasha she was increasingly a different character each time; by Infinity War she didn’t have her accent anymore as if Elizabeth Olsen realized nobody else on set would remember or care about Wanda’s previous portrayals. on god I liked her so much that I was even down to root for her and Vision but then the majority of it happened offscreen and lost me forever.

Pietro Maximoff - mmm watcha saaaaaay

Hope Van Dyne - cooler than Ant-Man but not by much. should have been a lesbian and kissed Pepper Potts in the moonlight.

Carol Danvers - fuck dude idk, I’ve never seen a movie she’s in lmao

Ant-Man - the recurring joke with this bitch seems to be “haha can you believe he exists? that’s dumb!” and it is. it is dumb. why did we need him? it could have all payed off with him crawling up Thanos’ asshole and exploding but we didn’t even get that. bullshit.

Vision - man, fuck, I tried to put him higher on the list than Peter Quill and I couldn’t make myself do it. that’s how goddamn boring Vision was. and you know what? fuck it, we’re putting him lower than Pietro, too. and even Ant-Man! we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here and he deserves it because I can’t think of one thing this dude did that I enjoyed other than being bad at cooking when he was trying to impress a girl.

Doctor Strange - I’m not going to make a Benedict Cumberbatch joke because that’s low hanging fruit but all I know is that this is the dude who’s mean to Tony in a horny way for five minutes of Infinity War. I never saw his movie, heard it was racist tho. and they didn’t even learn their lesson before they made Iron Fist! smh bombastic colonialism.

Clint Barton - last place because in the absence of a personality or interesting character arc I’m forced to judge him on the fact that Jeremy Renner radiates bad vibes and that in Endgame he gets a makeover that makes him look like he’d call me slurs for telling him to stop hitting on 16 year old girls at a gas station.

#no i am not open to constructive criticism

172 notes · View notes

themyskira · 5 years

Text

The Life of Captain Marvel - issue #1

So here we are. Issue #1 of The Life of Captain Marvel, the miniseries that was touted as a bold new origin story that would change everything we thought we knew about Carol Danvers.

And it starts strong by exploiting family violence, trauma, mental illness and traumatic brain injury for melodramatic effect, with no intention of dealing with any of these complex themes in any depth or sensitivity.

For all that, infuriatingly little actually happens in this first issue. No exaggeration, the issue actually includes a stretch of nine months wherein Carol essentially does nothing except mope and grow her hair out. The dang plot doesn’t even arrive until the final seven pages.

Content warning: This issue begins with a flashback to Joe Danvers verbally abusing and hitting his kids. I haven’t included any images, but I talk at some length about Margaret Stohl’s abysmal handling of themes of abuse and family violence. Just a heads up.

The story opens on a flashback to an idyllic childhood holiday in Harpswell, Maine. There’s a montage of Carol and her brothers flying kites, wrestling each other, splashing in the water and stuffing their faces with candy, while adult Carol muses that she used to think her family was perfect.

Then the flashback takes a turn. One of Carol’s brothers rips the kite from her hand, tearing it. Their father, Joe, descends on the boys in a rage and begins verbally abusing and physically beating them as Carol looks on, because — surprise! — it’s Traumatic Past Retcon time!

Goodbye Joe Danvers, well-meaning but hard-headed dad who’s never understood his daughter and whose approval always seems to be out of reach. Hello Joe Danvers v. 2.0, scary unpredictable drunk who hit his kids and terrorised his entire family. Aren’t comics fun?

The flashbacks are interspersed with shots of Carol in the present day, where she’s battling supervillains Tanalth and Moonstone. As the flashback progresses, present-day Carol lashes out violently, alarming friends and foes alike.

“That’s why fighting’s easier than remembering. I tell myself that if I’m strong enough… I’ll beat the memories down so hard they’ll never come back.”

What’s strange to me about this page is the way it deliberately draws a parallel between Joe, snarling and raising his fist to strike his powerless young children, and Carol, snarling and raising her fist to strike down a powerful villain. By implication, it places Carol in the role of abuser, indicating an intergenerational cycle of violence.

Which of course is never explored or discussed beyond this, because Stohl doesn’t want to actually talk about the lasting impacts and terrible toll of family violence, she just wants to exploit it for THE DRAMAS.

As Joe whales on his sons, kid!Carol tries to run to their defence, only to be held back by mother Marie, who tells her, “You’ll just make it worse. Now’s not the time.”

We will be told numerous times over the course of this book what an incredible, loving mother Marie Danvers is, and how she’s prepared to sacrifice everything for Carol. Her actions, though? Her actions consistently portray a woman whose number one interest is in not creating more work or emotional angst for herself, even when it means hanging Carol out to dry.

This is not to say that Marie isn’t a victim as well in this scenario: though she never fears for her life or safety (she could pummel Joe into the ground without breaking a sweat), it could well be that constant gaslighting and emotional abuse have left her feeling unable to oppose her husband in anything.

It could well be, but that is nuance that Stohl is not interested in exploring, and all we get throughout this miniseries is Marie making excuses for Joe’s abusive behaviour and prioritising her own comfort over Carol’s emotional wellbeing and safety.

So anyway, flashback!Marie says “Now’s not the time”, and in the present day Carol shrieks “WHEN - IS - THE TIME?!” while damn near beating Moonstone into a pulp.

The other Avengers are disturbed by this.

Iron Man: Hey, Carol? Could you maybe leave a little something on the plate for… you know… bad guy jail? Black Panther: Would you call that rage… disproportionate?

hellooooo unfortunate paternalistic implications. A female superhero has a hysterical outburst on the battlefield, while her almost exclusively male colleagues look on in bewilderment. (‘This is why women can’t be superheroes, they’re too emotional!!!’)

Cap and T’Challa have to physically pull Carol off Moonstone, as Carol begins to hyperventilate.

Adding to our list of things that this series has zero interest in exploring:

What it’s like to experience a panic attack or traumatic flashback

What it’s like to live with an anxiety disorder

What it’s like to live with trauma

The Carol of this story is not a woman living with trauma and mental illness, she is a woman who swoons hysterically whenever the narrative starts drag a bit. Her panic attacks are purely a plot device used to ratchet up the dramatic tension at convenient moments, and it’s some of the most insensitive handling of mental illness I’ve seen in comics for a while.

Next comes the obligatory scene of Carol getting a full medical in Tony’s lab, only for Tony to throw his hands up and declare, ‘welp, there’s nothing physically wrong with you, are you sure there’s not something else going on????’. Because apparently neither Tony — who has personal experience with trauma — nor Steve — who lived through a FUCKING WAR — know PTSD when it’s punching them (well, Tanalth and Moonstone) in the face.

I mean REALLY.

Tony: Look, the breathing thing is probably some kinda nervous tic.

hi, hello, person with an anxiety disorder here, please do not tell somebody having a full-blown panic attack that it’s just a ‘nervous tic’, you absolute insensitive fuckstick.

Carol: [sigh] It’s… Father’s Day. Not my favourite day of the year, you know?

waitwaitwait, so CAROL recognised that she’d triggered and experienced a traumatic flashback, but for some reason decided to play dumb about it until she’d after she’d had a pointless medical examination??

Tony tells Carol she needs to get herself sorted out or else somebody is going to get hurt, so she goes to visit her mother and younger brother Joe Junior at the family’s holiday home in Maine.

Carol flies into town past a sign that reads, “Harpswell Sound / Summer Home of Captain Marvel” Carol: [narration] Oh, brother.

‘Oh, brother’ is right. I guess at least it isn’t as embarrassing as the time Stohl introduced a D-grade Captain Marvel TV series.

“Sugar’s Donuts / Official Donut of Captain Marvel”

hoookay yep that’s a bit much now.

At the donut shop, Carol runs into childhood friend Louis Lee, who’s grown into a Designated Love Interest with an obnoxious phonetically-spelled accent

“Better keep that to yah self, Ms. Danvers. Wouldn’t wantitah get out that yah cheatin’ on us…”

I despise him already.

Carol goes up to the house and hangs out with her mother and brother. Over dinner, Marie and JJ ask her why she’s dropped by so suddenly. Carol evades and JJ blows up at her because apparently he’s been holding in some anger about how he feels she abandoned the family and didn’t even bother to come home when their dad was terminally ill. (Which, hey, here’s another potentially rich thread to explore — PITY IT NEVER COMES UP BETWEEN THEM EVER AGAIN.)

Carol shoots back that he knows full well she was avoiding home because of their abusive father, only to be interrupted by the door slamming as their mother walks out.

…eeeeeexcept apparently that was an art mistake, because the very next page is Carol chasing after her brother, the one who actually stormed out. She finds him at their father’s grave, drinking booze.

He offers his recovering alcoholic sister the bottle, and when she lightly turns it down he gripes that she’d always thought she was better than everybody else and she should feel free to piss off any time now. Then he gets into his car and Carol lets him drive home drunk like the responsible person she is.

“Part of me knew I should go after Joe Jr. I mean, nobody in my family was any good with a bottle.”

WHAT IN THE HELL, CAROL.

But nah, see, she has more important things to do, like scream at her dead father and desecrate his headstone, because that’s sure not going to upset her family further, nope.

Her little tantrum is interrupted by the sound of tyres screeching and a car plunging off a bridge because YOU FUCKING MORON you stood there and watched your brother stagger drunk into his car and made the conscious decision that ‘nah, I’m gonna let this one play out’.

and ohohohohoho how ~poetic~! He crashed right through the ‘Summer Home of Captain Marvel’

god I hate everything in this comic.

JJ is rushed to hospital, where he is diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, leaving him in a catatonic state.

And of course, Stohl’s Carol makes it all about her-fucking-self.

“In an instant, everything changes. You ruin someone’s life… it ruins yours right back. You’d give everything to have gone after him… and acted like the hero you’re supposed to be.”

Yes, JJ is in a coma with a traumatic brain injury, but let’s talk about how his near-fatal car accident ruined Carol’s life.

Anyway— NINE MONTHS LATER.

No, really.

We just skip over nine months.

Wherein apparently Carol has been doing nothing but poor-me-ing over her brother’s hospital bed.

Like.

She gave up her entire life and career.

Stopped saving the world.

Stopped interacting with everybody.

Just sat by JJ’s hospital bed looking melancholy and growing her hair out so that comic bros would stop complaining that she looked like a lesbian.

Tony tries texting her and she turns off her phone. So he appears beside her in an explosion of pixels.

which-- how?!?

There’s no visible technology at work here, nothing to indicate what’s projecting his image or enabling the two of them to communicate. Tony might as well be speaking to Carol via magic, for all we can tell.

Christ, it’s a superhero comic, it’s not like you have to work that hard to sell it to the reader. Two lines of dialogue: ‘What the actual hell, Tony?’ ‘Well, you wouldn’t return my calls, so I [insert technobabble here].’ That’s all you need. How lazy can you get?

Tony asks her to come back to the Avengers — we miss you, we need you, this isn’t good for you, etc. — and Carol’s like, ‘nah, I’m too busy wallowing in self-pity’.

And yes, like Carol’s PTSD and panic attacks, like the family violence, JJ’s brain injury exists solely here as a plot device. It’s not a disability he lives with or a trauma he survives, it’s a vehicle to bring melodrama to Carol’s story and a weakly-fabricated excuse for Carol to stay with the family and discover what she’s about to discover.

Because now it’s time to bring the still-catatonic JJ back home. And since the downstairs living room is more accessible than his upstairs bedroom, he’ll be taking the couch, where Carol has been crashing.

Yes, even though Carol has her own childhood bedroom in this house — we see it next issue — she has been couch-surfing for nine months. But now that somebody else has claimed her spot, she’s got to move into… JJ’s bedroom.

So she goes up the room and rather rudely starts going through her catatonic brother’s wardrobe and pulling his clothes out to make room for her own shit. Again, I cannot stress enough that she had her own bedroom in this house. She’s just… weirdly choosing to impose on everybody else.

In the wardrobe, Carol finds a box belonging to her dead father. The box contains a love letter, in Joe’s handwriting, addressed to a woman who is not his wife — along with what is obviously a piece of alien technology.

This is a comic with a goddamn identity crisis. It keeps tossing out plot hooks, only to abandon them pages later in favour of the next shiny idea.

It begins by announcing, ‘This is a story about Carol returning home and confronting her childhood trauma.’ Then it abruptly swerves: ‘wait, scratch that, this is a story about Carol struggling to hold her fractured family together after her brother is hurt in an accident she had the power to prevent’, and then, ‘hold up hold up what we meant to say was, this is a story about Carol discovering a hidden truth about her family and parentage’.

It’s like Stohl doesn’t know editing exists. Because spoiler alert: this story is not about either of those first two things. The first fifteen pages of this issue are a dead fucking weight. They do not need to be there, and in fact a lot of problems could have been solved by cutting them.

Carol decides to spend some time with her family because she’s working through some personal shit, and discovers a letter hinting that her late father was leading a double life. That’s it; that’s the story.

All these convoluted logistics around who gets the couch and who gets the bedroom? Not necessary. Again, Carol has a bedroom in this house. Since she’s not around much, it makes sense that Marie might be using it as a general storage space. So: Carol is staying in her old room and has to shift a few boxes to make space. In the process, her dad’s shoebox gets knocked loose from whatever nook it was stuffed into. THERE. EASY. DONE. PLOT UNLOCKED.

Like, the car accident actually makes it harder to get Carol to that point. The only reason I can see for it being there at all is to force the passage of time so that Carol can grow her hair out and dudebros can stop complaining that she’s unattractive. Because I guess it just never occurred to anybody that they could draw her with long hair to start with?

But ‘oh no, the aliens and the superpowers I can accept, but in the last comic I read Carol had short hair and I AM SORRY BUT there is NO WAY human hair grows that fast, this is BEYOND THE PALE’.

Oh, and can we talk about how Carol’s response to finding OBVIOUS ALIEN TECHNOLOGY is to go, ‘huh, I wonder what this is, let’s see if I can open it by smashing it repeatedly with a hammer’??

Carol: Huh. Let’s see if we can open it. [starts bashing the device wildly] Gah! Why — won’t — you— Marie: [off-panel] Carol! Can you help me with Joe’s tube? Carol: [wandering off as the device activates] Coming, Ma!

And then IMMEDIATELY GETS DISTRACTED AND WANDERS THE FUCK OFF, failing to notice that the OBVIOUS ALIEN DEVICE has suddenly activated and is now beeping ominously????

So while Carol blunders around obliviously, the obvious alien device sends a signal to a galaxy far far away, which in turn activates what is seriously and embarrassingly called a Kree Kleaner. A small spherical vessel orbiting a distant planet lights up and begin speeding towards Earth, while inside some kind of Kree cyborg gestates and grows to maturity at a rapid rate.

Meanwhile Carol sits by the sea with Digital Tony and mopes that “I knew my family wasn’t perfect… but I thought love was”.

you.

you fucking.

Look, I recognise that trauma is complicated and that family shit is even more so. I know people process and cope with things in different ways and at different speeds. And for Carol to suddenly discover that, on top of all the grief he was causing at home, her father was leading some kind of secret life with another women, must surely feel fucking horrible and bring up a lot of deeply painful memories.

But her reaction doesn’t gel with everything Stohl has told us about Carol’s relationship with her father.

We’ve been told that Joseph Danvers was a physically and verbally abusive alcoholic who terrorised his family to the point where, to this day, Carol struggles with PTSD and anxiety attacks. We’ve been told that Carol thinks of him as a mean, violent drunk who even in death haunts her family. She doesn’t understand why her mother stayed with him or why her brother still defends him, when all he ever did was make all of them feel small and powerless.

The idea that Carol would think all of this and yet still be totally blindsided to learn that Joe and Marie’s marriage was not a true-love-fairytale-romance is utterly, outrageously laughable.

Stohl presents the letter as bombshell that overturns everything Carol thought she knew about her family, indicating that Joe was leading a secret life she never knew about. It’s not. All it is is a confirmation of everything we’re told Carol already thinks about her father: that he was a cruel, self-absorbed bastard who treated his family like crap. You know what is a fucking bombshell?

The fact that Joe Danvers apparently had personal access to OBVIOUS ALIEN TECHNOLOGY.

AND AS FOR THIS LINE.

“And like they say, families were made to be broken.”

literally nobody says this.

I even checked, just to be fair to this comic, on the off-chance that it was in fact a thing.

One of the six search results is somebody on instagram quoting this comic. The other five are all related to the title of a single playlist on 8tracks.

But hey, like they say, Margaret Stohl is a fucking hack.

#comics talk #the days of our lives of captain marvel

17 notes · View notes