#which tony has done time and time again. constantly. his entire fucking character arc is that he feels he'll never be able to repent for

[nicklukenelson]

I'm a simple person, I see someone calling tony stark a narcissist, I block

#tony stark #tony stark adopt me challenge #tony stark defense squad #grinds my gears. not every person that does a few selfish deeds in their lifetime is a narcissist stop misuing the fucking term #mental health issues and childhood trauma do not excuse selfish acts but they can EXPLAIN them #it is up to the character that commited them to try and better themselves and repent #which tony has done time and time again. constantly. his entire fucking character arc is that he feels he'll never be able to repent for #the pain he caused in the past. u cant feel guilty about something without acknowledging that it was indeed a harmful action 😭 #stop calling this man a fucking narcissist. selfish acts are not the same. being misguided is not the same. having an ego as a defense #mechanism is not the same. being an asshole is NOT THE SAME #if ur gonna interpret his character wrong then just shut up (disrespectfully) #i am so far up this mans ass its a miracle im still breathing

[whetstonefires]

It's been this long and I'm still mad about it; proposal for the film Disney should have made instead of Endgame.

1) Following the Snappening Thanos still has godlike power but is losing his shit without a goal to work toward, is constantly hallucinating Gamora's child ghost which may be actual Gamora from inside the Soul Gem

2) whilst the combined hero cast stage an epic heist of some kind in the effort to get the Gauntlet and Unsnap their loved ones, with numerous subplots that can be resolved positively, since the heist will ultimately be foiled and that can be frustrating.

3) The surviving Guardians get a chance to onscreen recount the story of the defense of Xandar and how they collectively survived wielding an Infinity Stone for about 18 seconds; Peter Quill has been killed per Infinity War so his special heritage can't be leaned on again of course;

meanwhile we get more information about how the planet of Titan became a dead world and how Thanos was involved.

4) The 'Tony Stark's survival will protect the universe better than refusing to give Thanos the Time Stone and is in fact necessary to the One Possible Path To Victory' assertion from Infinity War is much better justified by his ultimately talking Thanos to death

5) in a way which callbacks Tony's entire doomspiral loop of a villain-coded-hero character arc and that moment in Avengers when they figured out Loki was opening the portal on Stark Tower because Tony psychoanalyzed him flippantly and then was like, shit he's basically me he's at my building. Thereby linking what was otherwise a saga of disconnect and flubbed resolution into a thematic whole.

6) And in a way which also gives us payoff on the similar nonsense of Thanos' characterization, where everything about the way he interacted with the world told a completely different story than the way he talked about himself and his actions, demonstrating a literally world-shattering degree of self-delusion.

7) Just seriously if Tony Stark's great universe-saving act could have been a Hannibal Lecture where he's standing in front of Thanos, last Avenger on his feet, armor shattered clean off him, take away all his power and what's left, still pushing, digging into those cracks Gamora's been beating into the whole film, did it work? was it worth it? is anything better now? why did you think it would be?

8) "Of course I understand you! I am you! It hurt so fucking bad, didn't it, and you needed it to stop hurting, so you found something to drown the pain in, something so impossibly big it had to matter. Something that let you hit back at the universe. Something that put you in control of the fear and the loss and how much you messed up, and other people paid for it and left you behind to hurt."

9) Thanos, having been held together by sheer force of will for the centuries or whatever since his planet died for reasons that cannot possibly have been limited to overpopulation, presses the Gauntlet on Tony, as he collapses into dust upon acknowledging that his entire identity is a self-serving lie and he had no fucking right to do anything he's done (and especially no right to Gamora)

10) Tony is one beat-up human dude and cannot possibly Unsnap back the entire universe but as he goes to try anyway a hand closes around his ankle. I don't care which Avenger it is. Steve, Rhodey, and Rocket Raccoon are the obvious candidates.

Team forms a huge hand-holding daisy-chain of Power of Giving A Shit and collectively Fixes The Universe. Insert time-crunchy thing like the planet they're on is about to get blown up so the gauntlet can't be handed over to someone with a tougher body, like Thor, who might survive it.

11) Tony still dies, but in a satisfying and meaningful way that actually saves people instead of just...slaughtering an army of slaves as in canon. The collective make-this-not-have-happened reality warp reaches back far enough to also save the Wakandans and Xandar and the Asgardian refugees, and everyone else murdered in the tempestuous final days of Thanos' push for the Gems, because 'unrealistic solutions to unrealistic problems are childish' is a bullshit moral, especially where superheroes are concerned.

12) His funeral is the only one that matters because it's the only damn one.

#if Rocket's the one who initiated the daisy chain he can have lost the arm he grabbed Tony with #sitting beside Bucky with matching wakandan robot arms #they're cyborg bros now #mcu #tony stark #thanos #thematic resolution #it's even got a comics basis psyching thanos out is the traditional way of dealing with his getting the Gauntlet together #hoc est meum

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on The Witness

[no spoilers... this game would be nearly impossible to spoil in text]

Where do I even start?

I guess one thing to know about The Witness is that you can watch the famous 9-minute tracking shot from Nostalghia - where Oleg Yankovsky tries to walk a candle from one end of a drained pool to the other without extinguishing it - in its entirety. (I think it’s the entirety, I left before the clip was over; yeah, Jon, I get it.)

How do we interpret this? I haven’t watched Nostalghia, but I know that scene. Every film major knows that scene. Tony Zhou cited it in discussing lateral tracking shots, how they emphasize environment and create emotional distance from humans in the frame, and how Tarkovsky uses this to make the sequence lonely and arduous. Kyle Kallgren cited it in discussing how YouTube makes critique of certain types of art difficult, and Content ID essentially decides for us what film as a medium is even for.

Jon Blow plays the clip in full with no commentary - or, rather, the game itself is the commentary. There’s a sequence in Indie Game: The Movie where Jon Blow expresses some pain about how his game Braid was received, how he felt no one who played it ever really understood everything he was trying to say with it. That feeling might be ameliorated if he weren’t such a constituionally obtuse motherfucker.

Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between Yankovsky’s dedication to a task that is simple yet difficult and the game’s puzzles, built, as they are, around complexity-through-simplicity. Except, Yankovsky’s Andrei has a personal investment carrying this candle, one Tarkovsky has spent the entire film setting up. I was about five hours into The Witness when I found this clip - more than twice the duration of Nostalghia - and I still didn’t know why I was solving the game’s puzzles or what they were trying to communicate.

Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between the patience it encourages in its audience and the calm, meditative mode all The Witness’ allusions to Buddhism are seemingly on about, to give yourself over to the time investment the game demands of you. Except, Nostalghia asks you to spend nine minutes thinking about one thing; zen Buddhism encourages you to think of nothing; The Witness asks you to spend between fifteen and forty hours thinking about a zillion things. It is not a game about clearing your mind, it’s about filling your mind up. There is little continuity between the thoughtless peace of meditation or Yankovsky’s emotional collapse and the game’s intended “aha” moments.

But the ambiguity, the contextlessness of the scene’s inclusion, means you can’t be sure whether it’s contradictory. If we assume it’s about dedication, and we find a flaw in that worldview, maybe the problem is that we didn’t assume it was about meditation. And vice versa. If it fails to communicate, maybe the problem is us.

The only thing this scene communicates for sure is that Jon Blow wants me to know he watches Tarkovsky.

Jon Blow wants you to trust he knows what he’s doing. That the game is saying something. He also never, ever wants to tell you what it is. (If he could just tell you, he wouldn’t have spent eight years making it into a game, I suppose.) But this operates on completely opposite rules to the puzzles. Puzzles in The Witness are maze-drawing panels with increasing numbers of rules, all conveying their rules nonverbally, through gameplay. You see a symbol you don’t recognize, or a shape you don’t know how to draw, and you try things out, you make assumptions, you fail repeatedly, and then something works, the panel lights up, and you know you got it right. Now you understand what the symbol means.

The theming doesn’t work that way. Whatever theory you have as to what the game’s about, there will be no moment of clarification. Blow has an incredible talent, in fact, for constructing imagery that is hilariously blunt yet still ambiguous. As with Braid, where he crammed a straightforward narrative about memory and regret with allusions to quantum physics and the atomic bomb, The Witness references Einstein, the Buddha, Richard Feynman, romantic poetry, tech culture, game design, and - most of all - itself.

I realize I’m dancing around the subject here, because what the gameplay is (or isn’t) in service of is far easier to talk about than the gameplay itself. The Witness is a big island full of touch screens where you draw lines on grids. That’s it. The island is dense with structures and biomes, impossibly having a desert, a swamp, and three different kinds of forest which appear to be in four different seasons. What it doesn’t have is any reason why you’re there or a justification for solving ~600 line-drawing puzzles other than because Jon Blow wants you to. I was wrong in my video from 2015 to call The Witness narrative-based; the game contains narrative but it is not a narrative game. The island is very pretty, meticulously crafted, and not trying in the slightest to look like a real place. It is Myst minus everything people like about Myst.

Absent a reason for my character - if I’m even playing a “character” - to solve the puzzles, why am I, the player, solving them? The short answer is, “Because they’re there. You knew what you were buying. You solve the puzzles because it’s a puzzle game, do I gotta draw you a diagram?” (No, you need me to draw 600 diagrams.) That is unsatisfactory because the island is clearly more than an elaborate menu system.

Do I solve them because they’re interesting? I mean, they’re not bad, if you’re into Sudoku or, like... cereal boxes. In and of themselves, they’re not my cuppa. People told me about a repeated sense of epiphany the game provoked for them, but that’s not the way I experienced it. Every puzzle is so carefully tutorialized that I never felt I was making an intuitive leap. There is no lateral thinking in The Witness, it is strictly longitudinal. You get a row of puzzle panels, and you take them one by one (you are, in fact, prevented from jumping ahead), each one building on what it taught you. And they get hard, certainly, but each is the logical progression of the one before. And each is a marvel of nonverbal communication, but that’s more Jon being clever than it is me. This is not to judge people who did get a feeling of discovery; one person’s “aha” moment is another’s “yeah, Jon, I get it.”

(Aside: I did get a proper “aha” moment when I came to a panel that could be solved two ways. It controlled a moving platform; draw one line, the platform moves right, draw the other and it moves left. And I thought, “Huh, I guess I get it, but those shapes seem kind of arbitrary.” But then, while it was moving, I realized the platform itself mirrored what I had drawn; the two designs were what shape the platform would take when connected with each endpoint! And I went “oh fuck, oh fuck, that’s clever, that‘s really clever.” My first epiphany. It was the most Myst-like the game got, it was clearly not the kind of experience Jon Blow was interested in recreating much, and it took place 7 hours in.)

Do I solve them because I’m compelled? In the first play sessions, I asked myself several times, “Do I even like this?” The game is often tedious and frustrating and I regularly muttered “fuck off, Jon.” But I kept playing. I got annoyed when people interrupted me. I got a hideous case of Tetris effect. They’re not the kind of puzzles you can spend the day thinking through, like you would with Myst or Riven; they’re too abstract to visualize without them right in front of you. And the world is pretty but it’s not a place I wish I could visit, like I would with, again, Myst or Riven. But I kept going back. I solved puzzles less because I found pleasure in finishing them than I found displeasure in them being unfinished. Jon Blow has given talks on how game design focused on being “addictive” is basically evil - his word, not mine. And yet... it felt more like I was playing his game because I was hooked than because I was enjoying myself.

Do I solve them because I trust Jon Blow? Because I believe this will all amount to something? Jon certainly expects me to trust him. The game blares PROFUNDITY AHEAD constantly. (I remind you it quotes the Buddha.) But, in the years since Braid, I have grown less impressed with Jon Blow’s “art game genius” shtick. One fun bit about playing The Witness so late is finally reading all the discourse, and, well before finishing the game, I had read the thoughts of Andrew Plotkin, and Liz Ryerson, and Andi McClure - all of whom are brilliant - so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. What’s surprised me is, having gotten to the first ending - not the secret ending - what the game is up to still isn’t clear. There are enough allusions to heady ideas that you can infer some stuff, but the default ending - while pretty enough - adds nothing and reveals nothing. And getting the True Ending means completing the In the Hall of the Mountain King section, something many will never find and precious few will ever complete. (Debating whether I’m going to even try.) If Jon Blow wants you to trust that he’s going somewhere with this, he makes you wait a long time before finding out if it’s worth it. [EDIT: turns out the secret ending comes after a different set of obscure puzzles than Hall of the Mountain King.]

Which leads me back to my original conclusion: I am solving the puzzles because Jon Blow told me to.

I suspect the arc Jon wants is for me to begin solving puzzles because I want to know what they’re in service of, what point Jon is trying to make, and then spend so long on them that I forget about the destination and just wrap myself up in the work, and, after dozens of hours on the hardest of the hard puzzles, Jon will finally reveal that the point he was making was about the labor I have just done. That he couldn’t tell me what it was for until I’d already done it. That the labor was its own reward. And how much you like The Witness is going to depend on whether or not you feel ripped off.

The overall impression The Witness left me with was less of meditation than discipline. (I have joked that playing The Witness feels like being in a D/s relationship with Jon Blow and not knowing the safe word.) Jon presents a simple concept and then expects you to solve every. single. permutation. of that concept. You do the work to find out what it’s about, and then what it’s about is the work. That game is about itself. The subject of The Witness is solving The Witness. It’s about purity of design, about simplicity, about slowly mastering a set of skills. (That these skills are neither inherently pleasurable to perform nor applicable in any other context seems not to matter; the point is, you learned them.) It’s hard not to read a game fixated on the beauty of its own design as all kinds of smug.

I allowed myself to be spoiled on the True Ending, and it seems, in the eleventh hour, if you draw lines til your fingers bleed, the game makes room for self-critique, questioning whether all this dedication to design actually is, in any way, meaningful or useful to us. Which, just a little bit, smacks of an artist spending two years making a sculpture of himself, chiseled to make him look a perfect Olympian beauty, only to label it “EGOISM.” Ooo. Make you think.

I suspect, in the end, I played it to (partial) completion because I was curious. I didn’t necessarily buy Jon Blow’s hype, but his hype is intriguing. As a portrait of a certain mindset, a monomaniacal obsession with design for design’s sake, the folk-religion of salvation through technology, and the critique of same, it is fascinating. I know people - smart people - who genuinely love this game, and, if the above is any indication, I clearly love talking about it. I have no regrets.

But, word of advice: if you don’t a) love the puzzles, or b) love the discourse, just walk away. Everything will be fine.

#capsule review #Adventure Games #the witness

[hackedmotionsensors]

Here we go Endgame lets talk about it! 

BELOW THE CUT

So I’ll say this!!! Over all!!! I liked it a lot. For a lot of reasons.

I also HAAAATTTEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDD a lot of some of the choices. That’s okay. We can have mixed feelings about movies especially the end of a saga. I think they did a good job of getting nods where they needed nods, bringing in storylines from previous movies and conversations that needed to happen.

And they fucking whiffed it on at least THREE REALLY IMPORTANT THINGS!!!

So lets start with what I liked.

1) STEVE TONY EVENT. DO YOU HEAR ME IT WAS A STEVE TONY EVENT  aaaah oh my god. From the second Tony lands back on the planet and Steve RUNS to him before even Pepper and he’s holding him and just the look of agony as Pepper takes him away and the fight where Tony says ALL THE SHIT WE HAD BEEN SAYING!!!! WHERE WERE YOU! YOU LIAR!!! and he RIPS HIS HEART OFF OF HIS CHEST AND GIVES IT TO STEVE BECAUSE YOU FUCKING BROKE HIS HEART YOU FUCKING FUCKED UP STEVE!!!!! FUCKK!!!! And then reconciling because “Resentment is corrosive” UGHHH!!! And Steve just barely containing himself when Tony shows up ughh!! UGHHH!!!!!!! AND THE ASS JOKE!!! THERE’S NO HETEROSEXUAL EXPLANATION ABOUT THAT!!!! TONY SAW STEVES ASS AND WAS LIKE TAN FRANCED IT LIKE BITCH YOU NEED AN FRENCH TUCK OF MY DING DONG IN YOUR BUTT!!! and Steve over the intercom being like “omg tony not in front of the kids” AND A STEVETONY SOLO MISSION!!!!!! 

A STEVE TONY...

SOLO

MISSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

TONY CALLING STEVE MY MAN  WOW. WOW. FUCKING EXCELLENT ON ALL ACCOUNTS THANKS SO MUCH!! I was given some bread thank you I will eat this stevetony bread nom nom nom nom nom.

2) Tony’s arc in this story was really beautiful. He finally got what he wanted, some perspective and closure with Howard. And I know initially you want to go “Hey Howard was really abusive” and yeah he was. But its complicated. Because Tony even says in Homecoming he was trying to break the cycle of abuse and he DID with Peter and Morgan. You can see just HOW MUCH he cares for his daughter and he was willing to say fuck you to the UNIVERSE in favor of not losing her. Its always a different perspective when you see your parents as people and not as YOUR PARENTS. 

Also Tony lying on the table with Natasha UuU. A lot of the interactions with Tony and the other characters were so good. Tony and Rocket. Tony and Nebula. Tony and Carol (tho brief). Tony arguing with Pierce like his little gay senses were like “This guys a nazi I bet”

3) I genuinely liked the Time Heist. I DID  NOT LIKE THE RULES OF TIME TRAVEL IN THIS MOVIE BUT I’LL GET TO THAT. But I looooved the Time Heist. From the New York stuff with Steve fighting Steve and knowing his dumbass loses his shit when he hears things like “Bucky’s still alive” and being done with his own stupid shit “I can do this all day” “YEAH I KNOW” (which btw at this point was basically the last thing he said to Tony in Civil War so maybe that doesn’t have its plucky little fire anymore and now is a sore spot). I loved Loki running away with the Space Stone (even tho as of now I’m still not sure what the FUCK THAT MEANS!? more on that in a sec) Loki making fun of Cap. Loki rolling his eyes at Odin. Tony dressed in a shield outfit screaming Medic!!! The gang all on the elevator and Hulk screaming about it and LOKI WAVING HIS HAND AT THE HULK AS THE DOORS SHUT!! TONY SITTING ON THE BRIEFCASE! SCOTT GOING “how the FUCK did you not know they were Hydra LOOK AT THEM They’re a COP!” Then jumping forward to the 70s and Steve’s legs that went all the way up to his asshole and Tony dressed as a doctor

I drew a doodle of it here you go lol I’ll post it properly later

oh did this not happen? Idk what movie you were watching.

4) The big battle at the end was SO FUCKING COMIC BOOK I WAS LOSING IT. Also I keep calling it the Battle of Five Armies or Return of the King lol T’challa BATHED IN A HALO OF LIGHT LIKE YES WE STAN A KING. MY WIFE

MY.

WIFE!!!!!!!!

VALKYRIE!!! ON HER BEAUTIFUL WHITE HORSE!!!! (also not being given an actual name and called Valkyrie is the funniest goddamn thing. Like that’s like going into a Footlocker and talking to the manager but calling them Manager)

CAROL!!!!!! WITH HER BUTCH ASS HAIRCUT PUNCHING THANOS IN THE MOUTH AND WRECKING HIS SHIT

WANDA FINALLY FUCKING FLYING. LIKE. F L Y I N G. THAT is what the Scarlet Witch is SUPPOSED TO DO!! SHE’S SUPPOSED TO BE SO POWERFUL IT TOOK EVERYONE TO TAKE HER DOWN CMON!!!!!! And she almost got him too. Honestly if it were down to Carol and Wanda they probably could have ended Thanos alone. 

Korg coming back for more comic relief AND PUTTING HIM IN TAIKA’S PINEAPPLE ONESIE!!!! ARE YOU KIDDING.

5) This is controversial. And I know it won’t age well. And that’s okay and feel free to disagree with me entirely. 

But I liked Fat Thor lmfao. I know it was played as a joke for the wrong reasons but I laughed. I was like fuck yes his belly looks like mine and that’s not why it was funny and it SHOULDN’T BE but I laughed lol. But on the other hand I think it had partially to do with Hemsworth constantly being like “no no we don’t need a shirtless scene” or just sort of a gag at how Marvel always has a shirtless scene and its just kind of funny to have it not be someone cut. EVEN THOUGH its a fat suit and I can’t take off my fat suit but Hemmy can and that’s kinda shitty. 

but I laughed. I can’t help it. He was a whole ass mess and I thought it was funny. And I know there are Thor fans out there who wanted more for him but like I said before this was a SteveTony event. This movie and this win worked because it was Steve and Tony finally coming together again.

It felt honestly the most comic book Avengers of the entire series. 

And true to comic book events

it whiffed the landing.

Before I get into dislikes I’ll say that I liked this movie more than I disliked it. I cried H A R D at the end of the movie. Because its not a movie that’s an on its own kind of movie. You had to have gone through the journey to get here. The pay off is completely lost if you only watch this movie. Or you only watch one or two of the MCU. Or if you’re like a few people I’ve talked to where they only like Steve and Tony. Or they only like Thor and Loki. Or they only like the Guardians and hate the avengers. If you have hate in your heart for any of these characters the payoff of this movie is pretty much lost.

The theme of this movie is clearly about moving on when things come to an end. When things stop or end or we lose people we love you have to move on. Steve says that at the beginning of the movie to our apparent gay representative straight director Joe Russo.

But like Tony said before.

Steve’s a fucking liar lmfao

But lets not start there. Lets start with the fucking timeline.

I hate.

I H A  T E EEEEEEEEE TIME TRAVEL!!!!!! AS A PLOT!!!!!!! WITHOUT ANY RULES!!!!!!!!!

I enjoyed what we SAW of the Time travel but the rules itself DIDN’T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE.

So when they’re suiting up Hawkeye for the test run Bruce explicitly says that all these movies that say “if you go into the past and fuck up the past you fuck up the timeline and the present/future is fucked because you’ve changed things”

ARE WRONG. HE SAYS THEY ARE WRONG. He says “If you go into the past. The past becomes your present. But the present then becomes your future. So you can’t go back and un fuck your parents to make you. Or kill baby Thanos. because that happened and you can’t change that but you can change youre present”

WHICH DOESN’T

MAKE ANY

FUCKING

SENSE. BECAUSE THEN YOU AREN”T TIME TRAVELING!!!!!!!!! 

If you go into the past yes YOU are in your present but the world is still being written around you STILL so you go into the past and change something (loki making off with the space stone) that’s CHANGED. You’ve created a new reality.

THEY EXPLICITLY SAY THIS IN DOCTOR STRANGE AND Y’ALL I KNOW DOCTOR STRANGE WAS BORING AS HELL BUT IF YOU’RE GOING TO USE TIME TRAVEL AS YOUR STORY DEVICE THEN YOU CAN’T SAY THAT SHIT IN DOCTOR STRANGE DOESN’T WORK WHEN YOU’VE ESTABLISHED IT AS THE RULES OF TIME TRAVEL.

THE ANCIENT ONE EVEN SAYS “you create a new reality. And it fucks shit up”

LIKE!?!?!??!

WHAT THE HELL!!!

So now Loki has the time Stone in reality B, in reality A Steve goes back and puts the stones back where they belong (and I guess.....gives the soul stone to Red Skull????????? wouldn’t you try to get Natasha back????like that itself is a whole movie of Steve going back and putting things away but ??????) 

And then we get to the end of the movie where Steve says Fuck you to Peggy’s reality A family and now on this timeline where they’ve time traveled he lived an entire life WITH Peggy but like.......you were Captain America and you just said “No don’t worry about JFK being assassinated. Or the Civil Rights movement. Or stopping Bucky in any capacity. Or maybe saving MLK. Or Peggy continuing to join SHIELD. Or stopping ACTUAL NAZIS from infiltrating SHIELD.

Because if you go with this idea that Steve went back and “lived a life” What did he DO then. What did he FUCKING. DO?

You’re not Steve from 1940s going back to 1940s. You’re Steve form 2019 going back to 1940s. No wifi. No medicine. No cell phones? Gays are still being persecuted. You can’t drink from the same fountain as black people (or rather they can’t drink from your white fountain). 

You are.

CAPTAIN.

AMERICA.

and you just said nah fuck it its fine? This shit can all happen but I don’t super care because I get to dance with Peggy. Peggy who on her own had this whole life. Who did all this stuff IN YOUR NAME IN YOUR HONOR. Who married someone else. Who had a FAMILY. Who had a NIECE that you made out with. And just..... wha....

Like if he had gone back and danced with her but came back with Natasha in exchange for the soul stone but during his travels had aged. Or met someone else.

Like movie wise and story wise I get wrapping up Steve’s story. And maybe the person Peggy is talking about in the video of her in TWS is actually Steve from 2019. Maybe that’s it. But it still doesn’t make sense because they FUCKED UP THE RULES OF TIME TRAVEL SO WHO THE FUCK KNOWS.

So. lol I wasn’t a huge fan of Steve at the end of the movie. I know they needed to do something to end the movie with a finality. With Steve being DONE. But instead of finality or closure I just have so many goddamn questions. And I don’t hold it against Evans or even really the directors per say. But I’ll blame Markus and McFeely because they were writing since TWS. They HAD the Cap STORYLINE to write about and that was how they ended it.

its like when you pack for a very important trip and you plan out all your outfits but then wake up late and end up throwing whatever you can find into your suitcase and run out the door.

It felt final and not final.

But I’ll tell you this. From my perspective and obviously I’m going to skew it this way because its me and FEEL FREE to disagree with me.

He left because Tony and Natasha were dead. The two people that he felt the closest to (sorry Sam, Bucky and Sharon [who we didn’t even see as dusted wow]) were gone. Natasha and Steve had become a brother and sister. He would always come back for her clearly. Trying to cheer her up as she’s crying. Natasha understanding Steve’s feeling of being lost. Tony inspiring and fighting with Steve. Like that’s part of what I liked about this is taht you could really feel how Steve and Tony needed each other for this to work but also they needed to not hate each other. 

Also I kinda knew the second Scott said “That’s a one way trip!!” before the 70s bit that Steve was going to stay in the past lol What an asshole.

Also I don’t think it was very UN-Captain America because I think people don’t always realize that a lot of the inspo for the MCU came ALSO from Ultimates. And if Ults Cap was able to go back to the past he would have in a heartbeat. Who was a more depressed Cap? Ults or MCU? I just don’t know.

Now.

Natasha.

This was another one I kind of saw coming from a mile away as soon as it was just the two of them on Vormir. I was kind of hoping they’d Hawkeye a way out of the deal by like throwing his daughters picture or something like that. Or that it would be Hawkeye. But they both had an upcoming movie/series so I didn’t know which way it went.

And then there was that big jump. And I was like oh my god they did it right

AND THEN THEY FUCKING DIDN’T.

Wow. Wowwwwwwwwww

Markus and McFeely 

REALLY DID THAT

THE RUSSO BROTHERS REALLY DID THAT

THEY DID THE SAME FUCKING SCENE TWICE.

The first time you get because Thanos is a dick and abusive and he would absolutely throw his favorite daughter into the soul pit (which I guess Isn’t picky because she didn’t love him back she hated him but I guess its a one way street with the ol’ soul stone)

And they don’t say during that one (far as I remember) that its a permanent exchange. 

But they sure emphasized this time. And they sure killed the original avenger who was the only girl on the team. Who never got a chance to live.

Who Whedon made herself call heself a monster because she can’t have a family and then she gets a found family and then SHE DIES. THEY KILL HER. AFTER HAVING A FAMILY.

WHAT THE FUCK. Like...my problems with Scarjo aside (which are similar with my problems with Paltrow) You DID. BLACK. WIDOW. FUCKING. DIRTY. I don’t care that there’s a movie coming out that was her story. You were supposed to give her a fucking story. And now her story is only how she relates to her TEAM OF MEN.

And now to my last point that I didn’t like. And I don’t hate this one as much as Steve’s ending or Natasha’s ending.

I don’t like that Tony died. I know this is wrapped up in a lot of emotions I have about Tony Stark the character. Robert Downey Jr the person. Tony Stark the character in all his forms is very important to me and I love that he has many forms. 616, Ults, AvAc, Avengers Assemble, the MCU. But his story is important to me. And its heartbreaking. I’m tearing up a bit now writing this out. 

I’m just the type of person that hates that a character, in a fantasy setting where you have wizards, valkyries, robots, talking raccoons and trees, Dave Bautista, a giant green rage monster wearing chinos, that you have to take this one part and make it realistic. That we have to keep realism kill this character off because it doesn’t make sense if someone doesn’t die. Because the stakes aren’t high if you don’t make them personal as well.

Which is true like you don’t have high stakes (the planet or universe getting dusted) if you don’t are about some of the people in that universe personally.

I just would have rather he had retired. Moved onto his little farm with Pepper and Morgan.

I think they did right by Tony. Storywise, ending...all the stuff the dropped the fucking ball on with Natasha and Steve they gave to Tony. And on one hand I get it and I appreciate that because (sorry to nat and steve fans truly) I care more about Tony. Tony started this whole thing. In a miracle of accidents they got the right actor, the right story, the right character, the right director, the right timing technology wise, the right social mood and made solid gold. And none of this would have happened if it weren’t for that amazing accident that happened.

And I think it has more to do with not wanting to let go or move on even though i can always go back to Iron Man 1 at any point and start the journey over again and have a laugh but there’s always going to be that ending where its final. Its done. Its over. And in the simplest of terms. I don’t like it. You have to know when to bow out and I respect and appreciate that. I don’t wanna see Iron Man 8 with geriatric old RDJ trying to fumble into a mocap suit.

I understand. I appreciate. But I don’t have to like it as a person. And that’s okay.

Its all about moving on isn’t it? That’s the theme of the movie. Moving on.

Even if you’re steve and your moving on wipes out the existance of a whole other family lmfaaoidnsfasfada sorry sorry. 

Okay. yeah that’s all I think I can think of. I’m sure there’s a ton more other people have mentioned aside from what I wrote. Like its a LONG movie and I think its hard to say hey “they fucked this up” or “they got this right” for EVERY SINGLE THING. There were so many characters. Nebula’s story could have been better. Thor’s story could have been more involved. Hawkeye could have been more important throughout the series. Janet could have come back for the final fight and healed Tony. Like there’s a ton of “this COULD have happened” But it didn’t. And that’s okay. It may not be right but its okay. I think they wrapped it up as best you could while still making a good movie. I think you probably can go back after a long while and look at the Endgame and go yeah that wasn’t so bad for an ending. Endings are hard to do with any sort of skill. Its why the joke that the third movie always sucks. 

There’s still a ton of stuff to look forward to.

Falcon/Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Wanda and Vision (i GUESS??? lol), Black Widow’s movie. 

Maybe Steve solved more than he let on who knows. WHO KNOWS. Maybe Mjolnir left him haflway through the journey when she knew he was going to ditch his 2019 family (who again....mostly dead now)

I love Tony 3000. Which I found out is more than a ton which makes Morgan Stark a lot smarter than I am lmfao

#avengers: endgame spoilers #endgame spoilers #avengers endgame spoilers #spoilers

[probably-not-star-lord]

I wanna talk about Endgame again...

I’m watching Endgame for the millionth time and the more I watch this movie, the more new things I notice. There are so many things I like about Endgame. I love how before I watch it I get all giddy and excited because I am constantly reminded that I, like so many of us, played a part in history. We faced the cliffhanger at the end of Infinity War. We waited a year for Endgame to come out, anticipating it and making theory after theory. We stormed the movie theaters and helped this movie make billions. This is something I love so much about Endgame and it makes me feel so damn proud.

However, there are a lot of things about Endgame that don’t add up. It was a great movie. I adore it and could watch it a trillion times over. But, there are elements that I despise. Yes, I’m going to discuss the fucking character arcs.

Tony’s was perfect. He marries Pepper and has Morgan and finally settles down, living domestically and putting down the Iron Man suit. He gains closure with his dad who tells him that he puts himself before the greater good, basically the opposite of Tony. Then, Tony sacrifices himself for the greater good, as previously mentioned. I was devastated that Tony died, but it made a lot of sense and I wouldn’t change a thing. Okay, maybe I would add in the kneeling scene because that was powerful as fuck.

Nat’s made a lot of sense to me. She’s always been a team player and her love for the Avengers grew more and more with every film. Her taking over the role of leading the team and keeping track of everything was brilliant. In the end, she also sacrificed herself for the greater good of the world and protected her best friend. I love the development Natasha went through, but her ending could have been handled better and given more attention. She deserved to be treated better after her death. Hello? A funeral maybe?

Bruce’s character arc was awful because an emotional and deep character was made into a joke. I get that he’s always struggled between being Bruce and Hulk, and that he essentially fixed his anger and can now be happy. I wish that development could have been done without melding Bruce and Hulk into one and making him laughable. He was a wreck in the first Avengers film and he grew slowly as the movies progressed, but he shouldn’t be changed into a version of himself that doesn’t fit with the rest of his arc. It would have been great to see him overcome his anger and coexist with Hulk, gaining control of when or how he becomes the Hulk. This could have made Hulk less violent and Bruce could live a more normal life without stressing about his temper. He doesn't have to look like Hulk wearing clothes and crack jokes about his appearance. He could have done all of that while still being Bruce. That might just be my opinion, though, because I love Bruce Banner when he’s just him.

No one liked what happened to Thor. I don’t either. Yet, I will argue that most of his development makes sense. He slipped into what I am assuming is some kind of depression, which he displayed symptoms of. He had a drinking problem, he gained weight, he stayed inside all day, he had panic attacks, he cried whenever his past was mentioned, and he essentially broke down. That all shows how Thor, one of the strongest Avengers, can be weak. That would have been genius if his character hadn’t been played for fucking laughs and made into a giant joke. I like the idea but, in the end, it was done so poorly. It makes me sick to think that what Thor went through was a joke when people face those issues all the time in real life and there is nothing funny about it. Thor’s development could have been emotional and written so well, but it ended up being something horrendous.

Now, unsurprisingly, I’m going to focus on Steve, Captain America, one of my very favorite characters. I love him and Peggy. I always have. I always will. I ship Steggy with my entire being. Simply thinking about him being with Peggy and the adorable dance the two of them share at the end of the movie nearly brings me to tears. It was beautiful, but it was not beautifully done. I understand what was trying to be developed, the entire movie Steve talks about how he can’t move on and then, ultimately, in the end, he doesn’t move on because he goes back in time to be with Peggy. That would have been brilliant, Steve getting what he always wanted. The weird thing is that Steve already had moved on. His entire movie trilogy was about moving on, making the Avengers his family and home, saving Bucky. He had moved on already. He said goodbye to Peggy before she died. Hell, even Peggy moved on during Agent Carter. Don’t tell me that the Steve we watched develop over the course of his several movies would have left Bucky Barnes in the past. The Winter Soldier even includes the “I’m with you until the end of the line” quote, explaining how Steve would never ditch Bucky no matter what he has done. Steve in Endgame left Bucky! That demolishes his entire character arc! Don’t tell me Peggy fucking Carter wouldn’t have told Steve she was flattered he came back, but this wasn’t his home. She had a husband, kids, a whole other life beyond Steve. I get that they were most likely soulmates and deserved a love story, but that’s not how life goes sometimes. The two should have shared their dance and Steve should have come back to the present. That’s what would have worked best. It would have given both of them closure and allowed Steve to stay with his family: Bucky, Sam, and the remaining Avengers. I truly get what was trying to be done, I do, but after seeing the movie so many times and watching him in other films, the Steve we see in Endgame is an entirely different character. He dresses different, he acts different, and he even talks different! We barely got a moment with him and Bucky, the man he fought so hard to bring back. I wanted Peggy Carter content and I predicted right after Infinity War that Steve would see Peggy and the two would dance. I wanted that to happen so fucking badly. What I did not expect was for Endgame to ditch all of the facts provided in the movie about time travel, shove Steve back in time to return the stones, not talk about it, and then leave him in the past. It didn’t make any sense! Steve’s character arc could have been done so well in Endgame, giving him what he deserves, but it just didn’t add up.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

#my opinion #don’t get offended if you don’t agree #i’m simply getting these thoughts of my mind #if you agree lmk! #if you don’t agree then also lmk but be nice about it! #add on if you wish! #i love to hear everyone’s take! #thanks! :) #avengers endgame #endgame #avengers #steve rogers #steve rogers character arc

[bonesingerofyme-loc]

Endgame is a movie about payoffs

An incomplete list of all the great ‘payoffs’ in this movie.

Hulk’s character arc/story is resolved offscreen and Hulk as a character is killed off. Shh no tears, only Banner now.

Loki’s death was meaningless

Thor’s character arc/story wasn’t even regressed, it was reset

Tony and Nebula’s relationship went nowhere

Vision’s body was shoved in a closet for five years I guess

Doctor Strange’s 14 million futures and 1 solution relied on a fucking rat

The main six avengers never got to be on screen fighting together

Natasha was killed off and her death is barely mentioned

Red Skull’s presence was revealed to simply be the writers going wOuLdN’t iT Be CoOl rather than having any deeper meaning or reason for it. Boy would it have made sense for the Avengers to maybe talk to the Stonekeeper since they know next to fuck all about the infinity stones. Or maybe resolve the whole ‘Steve and Red Skull’ thing, because it’s not like that was formative conflict for Steve Rogers.

Loki’s death was seriously fucking meaningless

Rocket sort of just existed. What did he do? Nothing. Who did he interact with? Barely anyone.

Gamora’s character arc/story is reset to a blank slate because she is a new person.

Drax’s whole reason for living was revenge and to strike back at Thanos. Never see Drax in Endgame except as part of the exhaustively long checklist of ‘HEY LOOK X PERSON IS HERE’

Clint going on a murderspree doesn’t matter at all except to give a reason why he isn’t in the first part of the movie. It has no bearing on the events and no one ever speaks to Clint about it. He doesn’t even act any differently from the mostly serious and broody Clint of the previous films. There isn’t even any tension about him coming back, Nat just says ‘Hi Clint come back’ and he’s like ‘k’.

Peter Quill, who I don’t even like, has only a single scene in the movie where his entire growth as a character and relationship with Gamora is reduced to stupid physical humor and a joke.

Carol Danvers was pointless. She exists to save Tony and Nebula, which Thor could’ve done with bifrost and to blow up Sanctuary, which could’ve been done far more interestingly. And yet the movie tried to weave her in pretty well by making her part of Natasha’s galactic avengers and then...did nothing with that idea. Was it too hard to consider maybe she shows up with whats left of NovaCorps or some Kree battleships?

Thanos proves that he was jobbing hard in Infinity War. What’s that, Thanos without any infinity stones could easily beat Tony in Mk85, Thor with both his weapons and Steve Rogers? I guess the entire fight on Titan was him just pissing around. It steals all the weight and strength that Infinity War gave the Avengers by showing that Thanos could’ve squashed any of them at any time and was never actually in danger.

‘Stark. You’re not the only one cursed with knowledge.’ What does that mean? Why does Thanos seem to respect him? Fucking who knows, since we see that in the past Thanos only vaguely knew about the Avengers and thought they were dumb nerds. I guess he read about Tony underneath a Snapple lid. 

Back to Natasha’s death - she dies and the movie decides it needs to focus on fucking Bruce of all people, when she and Steve had become very close friends over the past seven years, and from the implications Steve was the only one that actually kept in contact with her post-Snap when the Avengers all retired or fucked off. Fucking Bruce. 

Hey while we’re here, let’s keep up with Steve and his relationships. How about the fact he and Bucky never reunite on screen? How about the fact that all we have gotten between Steve and Bucky since Steve got his best friend back was what, three lines total between Infinity War and Endgame? 

Or how about Steve and Sam! You know, Sam the therapist that helped break Steve out of his shell. Sam the loyal friend who stood by Steve through thick and thin. Sam, who kind of was Steve’s first ‘real’ friend in the modern day. Sam, who only shows up at the end so old Steve who abandoned his friends can chuck him a shield. No reunion. No real meaningful moment. Just hey I’m old take my shield.

Or Steve and Wanda! Did you guys forget that the secret Avengers adopted her? How they were kind of like a family for that time after Civil War, with Steve the Dad and Natasha the Mom and Wanda their adopted weird magical girl? You know, how they took Wanda under their wing and started teaching her and treating her like a real person? Guess they did forget!

What about Valkyrie too, by the way. Valkyrie who spent a thousand years as a cynical drunk and then Thor helped her out of her self-loathing funk in Ragnarok. And then she I guess just said ‘sucks to be you’ and didn’t even try to help him? Or how about that Thor just kind of chucks her the throne like a party favor. Not even like he recognized she earned it or anything, Thor just said ‘hey, fuck my responsibilities I want to go be a failure in space, so take my job lmao’. Nice. I hate Ragnarok with a passion, but for fuck’s sake. 

Nidavellir. Establishes that Eitri is the last of the dwarven forgemasters left, and still has all his knowledge and skill. And that he forged the Gauntlet. And the plans for the Gauntlet are still there. Clearly, that means Tony should just whip together a nanite gauntlet in his basement overnight.

Carol Danvers and Nick Fury. You know, how Captain Marvel set them up as good friends, and then she allegedly shows up wanting to know where he is. Oops. That didn’t make the cut. Or her seeing Fury again after so many years. Double oops. Shit, this is even from the stinger of the last movie these yucks wrote, and they couldn’t even do it. Again - like Gagnarok and others, Cpt. Marvel is not even a movie I liked but COME ON NOW.

The intelligence/wisdom of the infinity stones. The space stone ‘judged’ Red Skull and cast him out. The soul stone has a ‘certain wisdom’. Ultron was made from the intelligence that lurked in the mind stone. Vision was linked to all the other stones and could sense almost a distress from each other stone as Thanos claimed them. NVM, stones destroyed lmao.

Infinity War went out of it’s way to make visually striking and different battle sequences and pulled out all the stops to really showcase powers. We got to see smart and interesting uses of all the stones during the battle on titan. Thanos actually had a wizard duel with Strange, showing that he is so much more than just a brute brawler. He blended caster and bruiser seemlessly. The color palatte was bright and arid, full of reds and oranges and blues and greens, well lit and extremely well choreographed. Tony showcases the amazing functionality of his Mk50 experimental armor. The battle at Avengers compound is dark, a color palette of grey, dark grey, light grey, and brown-grey. The choreography of the fight consisted of ‘surround Thanos and hit him with sticks’. We saw none of the MK85 suit. You know. The LAST suit Tony Stark would ever make. We saw none of Stormbreaker or Mjolnir’s power in Thor’s hands, only the most basic ‘fwoosh lightning’ from when Steve holds it. Where was Thor and his flying, his glowing eyes, Mjolnir-as-a-character that was present in all his fights in the past? Where was Steve’s mixed martial arts and his really acrobatic and distinct fighting style? Where was Tony constantly pulling new weapons and tricks out of his suit? The final fight of the Infinity Saga with the big three, and it’s as inspiring as a mid-aughties superhero duel. Just kind of slamming together and grunting. (I guess all the good fight choreographers were stolen by Alita)

‘I can do this all day’. The iconic line of Steve Rogers in the MCU, a touchstone for his character that is emblematic of his entire life and his drive, that says in six syllables the sum total meaning of what it is to be Captain America. Is played As A Joke.

Pepper Potts, whose character and relationship with Tony Stark to date can be summed up succinctly as ‘Tony no’ while he shouts ‘TONY YES’ now totally agrees with Tony and is all gung-ho about him deciding to risk his life, his daughter’s life, their lives, and the fucking universe to go a-time-travelling. What.

Steven Strange, whose movie was about him struggling to become a sorcerer and let go of his past and his preconceptions as well as the Ancient One seeing potential in him despite his roughness is shown to all be a charade. She actually knew all along he was going to be an OG badass and is so enamored with him that she’s willing to hand away the infinity stone she and her order have protected for millennia at the simple mention of his name.

Acausal time travel. Instead of enriching the previous movies by seamlessly blending into them for the time heist, Endgame goes out of it’s way to say ‘HAHA YEAH NO, THIS IS A BRANCHING TIMELINE’ so when you watch Dark World, Avengers, etc, there’s no intrigue of like ‘oh man, such and such is going on just around the corner’ because they so thoroughly bungled time travel and everything we saw in Endgame breaks the timelines. I can’t believe JK Rowling did a better job creating consistent and coherent time travel that carried narrative weight and tension in a children’s book.

Undoing the snap. All the speculation and theory about how, why, when, what, and it turns out all you have to do is just snap to bring everyone back and then act like the intervening five years of social decay and collapse never happened. 

Theodore Ross is very specifically shown in Infinity War to be the Secretary of State. Hm. A character who’s always been an antagonist, always against the avengers...in a high ranking government position...right before 50% of the population is dusted...right, yeah, nothing. Not the President after the snap. 

The snap itself. Smash cut to 5 years later, show some quick flybys and pay a bit of lip service to ‘oh yeah things are bad’ but that’s it. Don’t investigate it. Don’t show us how bad things are. Don’t explore it. In fact, everything seems pretty ok. People are still playing Fortnite five years later and cheerfully dabbing and taking selfies, so it’s all good right? Not like half of all life vanished instantly over night and the world is supposed to be falling apart. Nah.

Tony Stark’s death. Did he die to bring back the universe? Did he die to save his friends? Did he die to save his daughter or his family? Nope, he killed himself to kill the already beaten Thanos and his final words were all about himself. bUt ThE cAlLbAcK

Thanos. Killed off. Replaced by a cartoon villain version of himself. The Thanos that is the main antagonist that the Avengers beat? Not the Thanos who we got to know and who starred as the center of Infinity War.

Nebula. Best character in the film. Has no conclusion. No catharsis or reaction to Thanos’ death.

Groot. Split second shot of him and Rocket. No reunion.

Groot, again, and the rest of the Guardians. No chance to see Rocket’s reaction to the realization his entire family is gone or the effect it has on him. What was that scene in Infinity War? “Me? I got a lot to lose. I got a lot.” No relevance.

Stormbreaker. Major plotpoint of Infinity War. OP axe forged by Thor nearly sacrificing his life to a star. Yeets through a blast from a full-stone gauntlet. Is just a beatstick in Endgame, does nothing.

Infinity stones, again. Infinity War made them front and center, showing their many uses and delving deeper into the lore of them. Endgame makes them paperweights that can only snap.

I could go on and on and on. This is just off the top of my head, right now. Payoffs? I guess if you count the writers violently elbowing you in the ribs and shouting HEY ITS THAT SCENE FROM THAT OTHER MOVIE like you’re a drooling idiot as a ‘payoff’ it’s ripe with them, but actual meaningful payoff for a decade of characters and storytelling? Hah. No.

Edit: I will continue to update this as I think of/recall more examples

#marvel #mcu #avengers: endgame #endgame #HOW IRONIC FEIGE #endgame was shit #captain america #tony stark #bruce banner #natasha romanoff #thor #clint barton #avengers

[takerfoxx]

Strap in folks, because I couldn’t narrow it down to a single fav from this series, so buck up guys, because today we have a four-way tie! The fav(s) of the day are...

MEGABYTE! 

Reboot was a very special show. Not only was it the first all CGI show ever and singlehandedly innovated much of the technology, but it also featured great writing, great direction, and a lot of creativity. And it had some amazing characters, not the least of which was its main villain.

In fact, Megabyte might just very well be one of the coolest villains ever. He hasan awesome design that conveyed power, malice, speed, and intelligence, and he checked off just about every box off an awesome bad guy. Strong enough to throw around armored vehicles like toys? Check. Genuinely brilliant? Check. A thin veneer of class and manners? Check. Does everything with style? Check. Ends up being completely immune to the threat decay most animated villains suffer from and actually becomes more threatening, more ruthless, and more terrifying as the show goes on? Big check. Hell, he spends most of season three having actually defeated the good guys and ruling over all of Mainframe, and is only stopped from spreading his infection to the super computer at the very last second. 

But most of all, credit has to be given to the late, great Tony Jay for giving him just the most awesome voice ever. Ever line is just so silky smooth, so dripping with malice and evil. Whether he be trying to manipulate the heroes, giving dastardly commands to his underlings, or just dropping the pretenses and making it clear that he is here to fuck shit up, every word just sends a chill down your spine. 

But the best of it is, he actually wins! No, I’m serious, the final episode ends on a cliff-hanger, with a now more vicious than ever Megabyte having taken over Mainframe again and making it clear that he intends to hunt down the heroes one by one to eliminate them. This was done in hopes that it would drum up enough fan interest to get funding for a full continuation. Sadly, this never materialized and Reboot was cancelled for good, but I guess that does mean that Megabyte ends up the winner. And no, the Guardian Code doesn’t fucking count.

Plus he dueled Bob in an awesome guitar duel in what is probably the greatest moment in animation history ever, so that’s amazing.

AND HEXADECIMAL!

However, his sister Hexadecimal is a different sort of beast entirely, but no less awesome. If Megabyte is the perfect example of lawful evil, than she is chaotic evil incarnate. The woman of a million masks is far more powerful than her already OP brother, and a million times crazier. She cares little for power and control. After all, she has it already, and would rather spend her time wreaking havoc just for the fun of it.

Hex isn’t all that active for a first season and a half, probably because the creators knew that a villain that powerful would be too much of a problem to keep trying to come up with a solutions for. But her rare solo episodes are among the series’ best, with the heroes barely managing to snatch victory by the barest of centimeters, and having to rely on their wits to do so. And she is just a joy to watch on-screen, with Shirley Millner obviously having a blast voicing her. She can go from kind and grandmotherly to downright seductive to shrieking with laughter at the carnage she’s about to unleash to driven by blind fury at the drop of a hat, and every conversation with her has the participants constantly shitting themselves, hoping not to upset her. And she knows it.

Hex also gets a rather fascinating character arc. As twisted as she is, her infatuation with Bob does give her some redeeming qualities, and he is smart enough to take advantage of that to get her to do the right thing on more than one occasion. He also is the only person to show her genuine kindness, and one act of mercy eventually does convince her to throw in with the good guys. Even then she’s great fun to watch, as it’s clear she’s only in it out of affection for Bob, and everyone just has to learn to work with that, because what else can they do? But in time she becomes an actual hero herself, giving her life for save the entire Net from the greatest threat the show has ever seen. And it’s awesome.

I’ll freely admit, when I wrote Yuuka Kazami in Imperfect Metamorphosis, I pretty much ripped off Hexadecimal’s personality for her, to...interesting results. But as much fun as Yuuka was to write, she doesn’t hold a candle to the original Queen of Chaos, long may she reign.

AND MATRIX!

As far as kid characters go, little Enzo Matrix was...all right. He started off annoying as such characters do, but he did grow and mature and actually make himself useful, so his over-enthusiasm eventually became kind of endearing. And his struggles to prove himself once the heroes lose Bob was pretty fascinating. 

But then the show flips the script. He loses a game and is forced to switch into Game Sprite mode to avoid being nullified, causing him and Andraia to leave wit the game. And when we do catch up with them, it is much later, and little Enzo is all grown up.

And he is awesome.

Matrix is every 90′s anti-hero all rolled into one. He’s big, he’s muscular, he’s gruff, he’s short tempered, he likes shooting things, he has all the angst, and he even has a cool mechanical eye to replace the one he lost in the games. Normally this sort of thing would be annoying, but the show does take a great deal of time to show how his insecurities and PTSD have shaped him into what he became, with him often having to face his own flaws in his quest to get home. Added to the fact that we already know the plucky kid he used to be instead of just getting to see him in flashbacks, and you got yourself some great television.

But while show doesn’t cut Matrix any slack when he screws up (which is awesome), it also doesn’t condemn him for changing like he did, acknowledging that what he went through was terrible and he did what he had to do to survive. Plus, it also doesn’t shy away from giving him a lot of genuine badass moments. And that final fight where he goes one-on-one with Megabyte? Pure awesome.

AND ANDRAIA!

No raging angst machine is complete without someone level-headed to keep them in check, and AndrAIa is exactly that. A Game Sprite that befriended Enzo during a game and managed to trick the game itself into letting her stay with him. I admit, when I was a kid, I had wee bit of a crush on her, and was really interested in what this new character could bring to the story.

Like Enzo, she also has to do a lot of growing up to survive the games, maturing from an overly-literal fish-out-of-water into a cool and confident (and hot, I’ll freely admit it) warrior, who was the Ying to Matrix’s Yang. Their relationship was pretty great, from how they support one another to their bickering but always reconciling. AndrAIa is never one to take Matrix’s shit and will call him on it, but also be there to build him back up when he’s down.

Unfortunately, given how late in the series she appeared, AndrAIa doesn’t have much of a character arc of her own, which is a real shame. She’s a constant supporting character, and it did annoy me that she never really got much to do that wasn’t directly related to what another character was doing. Personally I would liked to see her have more agency and more of her own struggles to deal with instead of always being the one to help others with their own. Still, for what it’s worth, she is incredibly cool. I just wish she got to have more to do.

I come from the net. Through systems, peoples and cities to this place: Mainframe.

#reboot #megabyte #hexadecimal #enzo matrix #andraia #fav of the day

[shewholovestoread]

Avengers 4 - Theories and Speculation

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

So, I saw Avengers: Infinity War and I’ve been a mess ever since. The film really guts you in a way that previous MCU films don’t. I’ve always had a problem with Marvel films, in that the stakes never felt high enough, you knew that the protagonists would make it through the end because there was another film in the franchise.

Avengers: IW threw all the out the window. The film starts with 2 deaths and from then on, the Mighty Avengers are playing catch up. They really never had a chance (save for one, but I’m not going there) So who’s gonna come back and who’s dead for sure? Well, I have some ideas, so here we go:

Who’s dead for sure:

Loki, Heimdall and Vision. I’m pretty sure that they’re dead for sure. For one, Idris Elba is done with his Marvel contract and he’s been pretty vocal of late of being done with the MCU as well. Tom Hiddleston as well, as far as I know has also finished the contracted number of films (Avengers 4 being the final one, so we may see him in some capacity) Vision died when Thanos ripped out the stone from his head. Now, I think that this Vision is dead. We may see another version of him assuming Shuri managed to save his mind, the part independent of the Stone. So there is the possibility of White Vision.

Who’s Coming back:

Pretty much everyone who got dusted. There is no way that Black Panther and The Guardians aren’t coming back. For one, BP was one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed film in the MCU, there is no way that Marvel is permanently killing him off after just one film. Similarly, we know that there is a Guardians 3 film happening and we know it’s going to feature Adam Warlock. So Peter, Drax, Groot and Mantis are coming back. But what about Gamora, you ask? Well, recently the Russo Brothers confirmed a theory quite a few of us had; that Gamora is alive inside the Soul Stone. I think she’s alive because she was Thanos’ sacrifice to obtain it. In effect, she is its first inhabitant, the 1st person put in there because of Thanos.

Now there are some people who are speculating that she may not come back till Guardians 3, I disagree. Her arc, what happened to her is tied to Thanos. She was pretty much the first person to defy him, it makes no sense to keep her absent from Avengers 4 when Thanos is eventually brought down. It would be poetic for her to be there when Thanos meets his end. To see him look at her, someone he loved most (albeit his version of love is twisted as fuck) standing over him. I didn’t know how much I needed that till I wrote it down. As for why Thanos saw her in her child’s form, that’s easy enough. He saw her as he wanted to see her, as a child, when she needed him and likely didn’t question him. When she didn’t look at him with loathing because she didn’t know what he had done.

As for the others who got dusted: Wanda, Peter Parker, Dr. Strange, Bucky, Sam Wilson, Maria Hill and Nick Fury, do you seriously expect me to believe that they’re gone for good? I’m not buying. For one, We need Dr. Strange to wield the Time Stone, for second we know that Homecoming 2 is in the works and Bucky is tipped to take over the Captain America mantle from Steve and Sebastian Stan has a 9 film contract with Marvel so he’s certainly not done. In which case, it doesn’t make sense why some of the characters would come back while others don’t when eventually they had all suffered the same fate. It does not compute.

Also, I can’t wait to see Okoye, Black Widow, Wanda, Gamora, Nebula, Wasp and Captain Marvel collectively kick Thanos’s ass.

We know that Avengers 4 has to undo Thanos’ genocide otherwise it was all for naught, half of the entire universe’s population stays dead and how is that a good end for this phase.

Speculation:

Now, how will we get people back from the dead? There are a few ways that it could come to pass... For one, it is entirely possible that the remaining avengers manage to get their hands on the stones after Thanos’ gauntlet disintegrates. I also don’t think any one Avenger will wield all the stones, more like a collective wielding. Strange will definitely wield the Time Stone, the rest are up in the air.

I have a feeling that the events in Ant-man and the Wasp take place slightly before the events in Avengers: IW or they’re running very close to parallel. Which is why, it still has the light-hearted tone that we usually associate Marvel films with. It’s only at the end that we’ll see the ramifications of Thanos’s finger snap affect the characters in Ant-man and the Wasp. It would be a pretty neat lead-in to Avengers 4.

As for Captain Marvel, I think it’s going to be a flash-back film. Marvel will need to tell us why she was missing for so long/ where she went. The reason I think it will be a flashback because it doesn’t make sense to a regular prequel/origin film just before Avengers 4. The tone will likely not match, not to mention that the time difference would be jarring (CM is set in the 90s).

What about Iron-Man and Captain America:

These guys are the first avengers and in many ways the fabric that holds the team together which is why the Avengers fell apart when Tony and Steve had a falling-out. The events in IW in many ways foreshadow what might happen to these guys.

While many speculate that Steve will die in the A4, I think it’s going to be Tony. Why? Let me elaborate: we see Tony and Pepper in IW, Tony wants to start a family but he can’t stop being Iron Man. It’s in his DNA. He loved Pepper, but even she can’t keep him from being Iron Man. He can’t stop, his identity as Iron Man is deeply tied in to who he is deep inside.

Steve, on the other hand, joined the military because he wanted to do the right thing. He became Captain America, not for glory but because, he felt it was the only way he could contribute. At his core, he’s a peace-maker. He doesn’t like conflict and only engages when he has no other alternative. He would want a quiet life, heck, he would want to get a chance to live his life, without being constantly on the run or fighting.

Also, Steve already died once, I refuse to believe that Marvel would do that again.

I need Steve to walk away, I will NOT be able to deal with his death! Don’t do it Marvel!

I think A4 will end with Tony’s death and Steve stepping down from the Avengers and handing over his mantle to Bucky.  It would be a good way to end Phase 3 and kick off Phase 4.

#avengers #avengers infinity war #avengers infinity war spoilers #avengers iw #avengers iw spoilers #steve rogers #bucky barnes #black widow #natasha romanoff #scarlet witch #wanda maximoff #tony stark #iron man #thor #loki #captain america #vision #peter quill #peter parker #spider-man #star lord #gamora #nebula #drax the destroyer #rocket #groot #mantis #shuri #black panther #t'challa

[liketolaugh-writes]

I don't really follow MCU universe much but I am curious on what are your opinions Tony Stark? Personally I liked him but a friend of mine kinda is really anti of him and since I didn't delve much deeper into it I let it pass but after reading CC, I am curious on your thoughts since you are usually pretty good at characterization from what I've seen with your DGM works? Only if you want to, I mean.

Tony is my favorite, okay? I know this isn’t at all clear from my Avengers work, but you’d pick it up pretty fast going through my bookmarks.

So, speaking purely from the intellectual let’s-do-a-literary-analysis-right-now standpoint, his character growth is absolutely amazing. He has a very distinct character arc, with its ups and downs, definitely with a general upwards trend. You compare Tony in the first Iron Man movie to the one in Homecoming, you’ll see what I mean, yeah?

He makes mistakes. He makes a lot of mistakes, okay, he’s an ass. But he learns from them, and it’s obvious that he learns from them, that’s the whole point. The very first Iron Man movie is literally all about this, him fixing the mistakes he made in not keeping close track of his weaponry. He messes up, but he also tries real hard, and despite what a lot of people say he actually is one of the first to fess up to his mistakes. He just doesn’t do it in, y’know, words.

Let’s talk about Civil War, because let’s be real, it’s fucking always about Civil War; it’s the highest, most extreme point of Tony and Steve’s character arcs so far. And again, yeah, it’s always about Tony and Steve, they’re the two main focus points, and anti-Tony is almost always meant as pro-Steve.

Civil War, for those of you who don’t remember, is about two things: the Accords, which put the Avengers and, I believe, other superhumans, under a set of restrictions. Don’t remember the specifics, I haven’t seen it in a while. And then there’s Bucky, who, through no particular fault of his own, has been running around killing people. The Accords would make him suffer, and prevent the Avengers from doing anything about it.

In turn, Civil War can only be fully understood within the context of the rest of the MCU - more specifically, the character arcs of Steve and Tony. But this is about Tony, so I’ll just talk about his right now.

Tony’s is first, because I love talking about Tony’s character growth. First, we have the first Iron Man movie, our starting point - Tony the billionaire, Tony the playboy, Tony the selfish, narcissistic asshole with only a minor quantity of self-awareness.

And then he gets blown up by his own weapons, and gets a huge, a massive kick in the ass. Won’t bore you all with the details, I’m sure you remember most of this part, but he gets out, and - starving, hurting, tired - one of the first things he does is shut down the weapons sector of his company. Because it’s hurting people, and now he knows it.

Cutting forward a little, we arrive at Age of Ultron, and Tony makes a huge mistake. He creates Ultron, who attempts to destroy the world. For some reason, the entire blame for this tends to get laid at Tony’s feet? Y’all, he picked up a HYDRA thing, found an AI, and mostly just left it sitting there. That’s literally it. Anyone could have done that. But, I digress. At the end of the movie, he takes responsibility for it, and leaves the Avengers.

And then, when Civil War arrives, he firmly takes the side of the Accords, which would force the Avengers to take accountability for the damage they cause. Tony, with a history of stolen weapons and huge mistakes, thinks they shouldn’t be able to go home free. This is what we call character growth, and it’s so good, it’s so damn well done and Tony’s learned so much.

This is my favorite thing about the MCU. At its core, it’s a moral debate, not just a single black-and-white theme, which is one of the reasons it works so well as a franchise instead of a small set of movies, a trilogy or something. It just wouldn’t work as well. But anyway, I’d present Steve’s side, but then I might have to debate it more fully and I do not have the time for that right now, I’m meant to be avidly reading Spiderman fanfiction.

I’ll take you one step forward, too, to Spiderman: Homecoming. Now, it doesn’t have a Tony focus, but I’ll drop one key point: one of the biggest things he teaches Peter is accountability. He makes sure Peter knows that recklessness could cost lives. (Considering Iron Man 1 and 2, I repeat: this is character growth.)

Anyway - more personally, I just really like him!! I adored his role in Homecoming, guys, he’s trying so hard to do right by Peter. I’d say more but, well, the movie’s really new, so-

Tony’s actually pretty demonstrative, but it’s unconventional, and to a lot of people it looks like bribery. To those people, I would like to introduce the concept of ‘5 Love Languages’, one of which is gift giving. Tony’s inability to express himself in words despite talking constantly shouldn’t be held against him, yeah? (There’s also ‘acts of service’, ‘physical affection’, any of this sounding familiar?)

And again! He tries!! Really hard!! If you’ve ever talked to me about Howard Link for too long, you know how much I love that. Allen too. Trying isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing. Tony throws a hell of a lot of effort into everything he takes halfway seriously.

I could go on for ages, but I think that’ll do. *laugh* Seriously, I love Tony, he’s great. Sorry if this is more than you expected, anon!

#mcu #tony stark #steve rogers #iron man #captain america #ask #Anonymous