#I’m leaning towards that its biggest crime was being poorly-executed and therefore an uncompelling story | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

daydreamerdrew · 2 years ago

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I know it’s been a bit since this all happened but seeing people say, after having watched the second Shazam movie, that they wanted a Mary spin-off, and then finally actually watching the movie myself was so strange for me.

because I would have assumed that, as someone that’s already really invested in Mary but was also not expecting much of anything too substantial from these movies and was excited to see her depiction anyway, I would be the easiest person possible to please with her portrayal as long as she wasn’t characterized in a way that actively contradicted how I view her, which would then really bother me. but then I really didn’t care about her at all in the movie. it wasn’t that her usage in the story bothered me so much as that it didn’t really prompt a response from me in the first place.

because her problems exist in the beginning of the movie and then nothing specific happens with her regarding them for the rest of it, they only serve to prompt a specific reaction from Billy as a part of his arc, and for me that’s a situation that inherently cannot make her compelling as a character.

I know that part of this is that people went into the movie with specific expectations about how her character would be used from how she was used in the first movie, as well as that the existence of The New Champion of Shazam! (2022) has provided essentially evidence not much of that a spin-off where she goes to college is going to happen but of that it would be a good idea for it to happen, because that something happened in a comic book is often used to mean ergo it should be used in the live-action adaptation because it would be satisfying to see it made into live-action, regardless of how what’s already been done in live-action has or hasn’t set it up for that to be a satisfying direction for that story as a stand-alone work without the context of the comics.

and I do personally really want to see Mary’s life when she’s away at college actually fully realized in a story, but that’s because New Champion convinced me of the potential in that concept and then didn’t fully deliver on it, not the movies, and I don’t necessarily want to see that happen in the live-action format. I’d actually rather see it in the comic book format. which is all to say that I’m not bothered at all that it’s looking like we’re not going to be getting any more of these movies.

#the threads here that extend beyond my response to Mary’s usage in Fury of the Gods specifically #is that now that the comic iteration of Billy that was introduced in the New 52 reboot is all said and done #as the comics are moving away from that characterization and I don’t expect them to return to it #and the movie-verse that adapted it is ending #I’m leaning towards that its biggest crime was being poorly-executed and therefore an uncompelling story #and not my disapproval of the direction the character was taken in #because the 2012 origin story is despite that a solid story #on its own and not as a commentary on the character’s prior history #and then everything published between then and the 2018 follow-up ongoing #was seemingly incapable of doing anything interesting with that specific iteration #and just kept having him have the same problems that he had at the beginning of the origin story #and demonstrating him getting over them again and again #which is inherently doomed but even so happened in progressively less interesting ways #and then the 2018 follow-up ongoing to the origin story could really have not have fumbled harder #because while being overall poorly written and drawn #it refused to commit to the concept originally introduced in the origin story #as well as the conflict that was introduced in the ongoing #which was that Billy was experiencing conflicted feelings about his family #except no not really at no point in time was there actual conflicted feelings being had #in favor of something that maybe was more palatable to more people but was doomed by being hollow and boring #like I stopped following the book as it was coming out not because I was so bothered by it #but because I couldn’t be bothered to take the time to read it when I could spend my time reading better comics #all of which lead to the situation of this version of the character’s conclusion in Revenge of the Gods #where it’s just a repeat of the only conflict that anyone’s ever been willing to commit to with him #that he’s inexperienced as a superhero and is only playing at it and doesn’t know what he’s doing #which is also doomed because it gets less and less convincing the more times that story is told #and so the more we've seen him accumulate experience #also I’m not satisfied by superficial references to comics canon in live-action adaptations #it has to work as its own compelling story or I just don’t care and will continue to only be invested in the comics #my posts

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