#brings me back to when my account was actually mostly analysis posts and intelligent thoughts lmao

[booksandpaperss]

so this post by @theonebyler talking about this (alleged) rack-focus shot—

—really got me thinking about the ending of volume 2 actually giving us the Mike POV we’ve (mostly) been missing all of season 4. This started as a quick reblog of Em’s og post but it turned into its own post and I didn’t wanna hijack the original, so here you go byler tag!

What’s interesting about the last 30 minutes of volume 2 is that we really do finally start to see Mike’s POV more clearly with camera angles.

For example:

At the start of volume 2, we get the van scene, and while we do have some head on shots of Mike that are very incriminating, we also get shots like… this

The focus is on Will, and Mike is BLURRED in the background. We are literally being censored away from how he’s feeling here, probably bc that expression would’ve immediately confirmed that Mike actually did understand what Will was saying. But we as the audience don’t get that confirmation here, we’re kept from really seeing Mike.

But then, at the end of volume 2, we get shots of Mike looking at Will like THIS

just LOOK at that. That is a head on shot of Mike just staring at Will. He seems worried, but he also seems mesmerized. And while Will can’t see Mike looking at him like this, this time, unlike the van scene, we as the audience can. We’re finally being given a real look into how Mike is feeling, and I guarantee you that if we had gotten more uninhibited head on shots of Mike like this in volume 1, those quick glances that we eventually caught him doing after looking closely would’ve been a lot more obvious. There’s also something to be said about the fact that Mike seems to be letting himself look a little longer in volume 2… but that’s another conversation.

And to add to Em’s earlier point in her post, this cabin scene shot isn’t the first time we’ve seen a shot like that�� it’s just been reversed:

Look at how similar these are. Even the circumstances are similar in the fact that one of them is clearly stressed and their side profiled at the edge of the frame, while the other is staring at them in worry and also… something else 👀

As Em was starting to point out, all the camera angles that were used in volume 1 to portray the depths of Will’s feelings for Mike were being used towards the end of volume 2 for MIKE while looking at Will. And If those shots were romantic for Will, that absolutely means they were romantic for Mike too. I would even argue that atp saying these shots are showing Mike’s romantic feelings for Will is implied canon, but that would probably start riots lmao

This also all lines up perfectly with the formula for byler that the show has been using so far: show Will’s crush in season 3, then show how deep those feelings actually go in season 4 while simultaneously showing Mike’s crush in the same season, which of course strongly suggests that we will be getting Mike POV in s5 in the same way we got Will POV in s4, showing the depths of Mike’s feelings for Will, and so the end of volume 2 was essentially transitioning into what’s gonna be full Mike POV.

It also matches up with my theory/analysis that Mike’s queer realization arc is exactly one season behind Will’s. I might have to revisit these Mike POV shots in more depth and detail actually for that bc like… wow.

[desperatelyseekingdennis]

Captain Marvel

I went into this expecting mediocrity, and was not disappointed. About on par with Ant Man and the Wasp, but without Paul Rudd to make it enjoyable.

Surprisingly, the soundtrack is absolutely the worst part of the movie. That's usually one area Marvel nails, but but here. They kept trying to use pop songs to tie the movie to the 90s, but none of them really fit the scenes. It's obviously possible to pull this off (Edgar Wright comes immediately to mind for another Ant Man comparison, or else various Iron Man scenes) so there's really no excuse.

Action and effects were passable, and the plot not the worst I've seen but still pretty bland. Despite getting a lot of screen time, I never noticed Jackson's de-aging. All told it wasn't a complete waste of money, but I definitely wish my girlfriend hadn't insisted on seeing it in the theater.

From here on out spoilers ahoy as I did deeper into my feelings about specific scenes.

(I started this right after the movie was released, and wrote a giant ten page analysis of the entire plot scene by scene.  I saved it to my drafts, forgot about it, then just now erased the entire thing and am going to try and be more focused on just the bits that don’t make sense to me)

So first of all, the “surprise twist” that drives the entire plot doesn’t work in the MCU.  The Kree have been villains in several live action properties at this point.  The entire plot to the first Guardians was that the Kree are so militaristic that a bunch of them refused to honor a peace treaty.  That they’re the put upon victims of the oppressive Skrulls just doesn’t work in this context.  Maybe if you’re a comic book fan who knows the Skrulls are *also* villains, but most viewers aren’t going to know that.  So it was obvious before they even reached Earth that Jude Law was the bad guy. They’d have been better served picking some other random alien race for her to be a part of.  Yes, I know Mar Vell is historically Kree, but he’s also historically male so clearly they don’t care that much about source material.  In a pinch, just make Mar Vell a Kree and these new guys are after her research.  

The premise that Danvers doesn’t know she’s human also doesn’t make much sense.  Did she never bleed in the six years of combat training?  Also, and maybe I’m overlooking something, but have there ever been any other white Kree?  There’s the one black guy, but even he has a sort of bluish tint.  Then there’s Jude Law and Carol being straight crackers.  ?????  Again, making not making them all Kree would have gone a long way towards fixing this.

Why did SHIELD show up at all?  Fury doesn’t believe Danvers is an alien when she claims to be one, so what exactly did they think was worth investigating?  They should have MIBed this bitch.  Either Fury is a cop that gets taken into SHIELD as a result of him killing a Skrull without training, or he’s the SHIELD agent that takes over after the cop on the scene does so.  I’m pretty sure Agents of SHIELD established that Coulson was an analyst before becoming a field agent, so using him for that roll doesn’t work well.  But given this was a GURL POWER movie, this would have been a fantastic opportunity to give Agent Hill some back story. 

In the train scene, how did she know to punch the old lady?  They’ve already established the Skrulls are so good at pretending that the Kree have to implant safe words deep in your subconscious to prove your identity, but for some reason she can spot one in a crowd of (what to her are) aliens?  For that matter, if they are telepathic, why could the one guy not identify that Fury doesn’t go by Nicholas?  That whole scene where he specifies that he only goes by Fury should have been pretty close to the surface. Even so, that scene was so bad.  It was so obviously tacked on to use as a plot device later.  The writers are aware that Fury has appeared in other movies, right? That he’s not an original character? What happened in the next twenty years that made him reevaluate people calling him Nick?  <Danvers reads his ID> “Thank’s Nicholas” “Only one person calls me Nicholas, and you aren’t my momma.  Its Fury.” Was that so hard?  

The scene with the biker was so bad.. It could have worked if they’d done something with the “why don’t you smile” line, but they didn’t.  He said it, end scene. ??? It also felt like it might have been a Terminator reference that also fell flat, but that might just be my imagination.  As it stands, it only serves as a wink and a nudge at their SJW targets, without actually providing anything for the rest of the audience.

Why is the light speed engine so important?  Mar Vell seems convinced it will bring peace to the galaxy, and Jude Law at least pretends to think it will allow them to conquer it.  But they already have the weird window portal things.  I guess the weird portals are static in space, so I can see where FTL travel independent of them would be beneficial, but hardly the game changer its being made out to be.

On the subject of pointless McGuffins, lets review the history of the Tesseract prior to this movie.  Odin loses it on Earth, where Red Skull discovers it  The Real Captain steals it from Red Skull, but loses it in the ocean where eventually Howard Stark will recover it and give it to SHIELD.  It stays with SHIELD until Loki steals it in the opening scene of the Avengers.  Its stolen like five more times before eventually Thanos uses it to murder Spiderman.  Nice chain of possession, no unexplained gaps.

Post Captain Marvel, we learn that along the way somehow the Air Force gets hold of it, where an alien managed to steal it and hide it on her space ship for at least six years before SHIELD, completely unaware of its existence, stumbles upon it.  Again, the writers are aware that there were other MCU movies before this one, right?  This isn’t really a problem per se, its just dumb.  Its answering a question nobody had, complicating a narrative for no reason except that they couldn’t come up with a non-Infinity Stone McGuffin.

When they fly into space and can’t find the space ship, Danvers is just like “Open sesame” and the ship decloaks.  ???  How worthless is Kree cloaking technology if it can be turned off remotely by somebody who doesn’t even know its there?  

It was pointed out on Twitter that the song the Supreme Intelligence dances to that she pulled out of Danver’s memories would have been released after Danvers moved to Hela. I can’t confirm that because I don’t remember what song was playing, but if true that’s pretty bad writing.  People will write it off as “she probably heard it in the car with Fury” but you can’t just invent a scene to fill in a plot hole.  That’s the writers’ job, and they didn’t do it.

There’s more to unpack in that Supreme Intelligence scene, but they mostly come down to “what are the rules of this technology?”  

Then the climax.  Oh my god the climax.  She thinks real hard and destroys the little chip that’s been blocking her powers (bee the dubs, until they explained otherwise I thought the little chip was the source of her powers), then suddenly she’s God.  No ramping up, no learning curve.  Just “oh, I can fly now and direct fire from a fucking attack cruiser doesn’t hurt me” and the movie is over.  What the actual fuck.  I can’t even put into words how bad the last act was.  

So I won’t.  Instead, I’ll talk about Thor: Ragnarok.  At the beginning of the movie, he’s cocky as hell.  He’s stupid over powered, and he knows it.  So when his sister appears he ends up losing his hammer because he’s so sure of himself that he doesn’t take a moment to think about the situation.  Then he winds up on the Junk Planet, and he’s still cocky.  He’s going to fight the champion and get off the planet then go kill his sister no big deal.  But he loses there, too.  He’s starting to lose faith in himself, but it doesn’t matter because he’s the only one that can do what needs to be done.  Finally he’s able to get off planet and back to his sister... Where he loses again. Now he’s hit rock bottom.  His people are going to die because he wasn’t strong enough to save them.  At that moment, he has a literal deus ex machina moment (in that Odin is a literal god) and regains all his power and proceeds to kick all the names and take all the ass.  (that was meant to be an Infinity War reference and not a suggestion about what his intentions re: Valkyrie, honest)  

At this point in the movie, he’s basically at the same level Danvers is at the end of hers.  Completely unstoppable, unreasonable power levels all around.  The difference is he earned his position.  He fought for it, almost died for it several times. Danvers just... thought real hard.  At any point in the movie did she lose a fight?  Was she ever in any real danger?  Even in the opening scene when she’s sparring with Jude Law its made clear that he’s incapable of beating her which is why he’s pushing her to learn to hold back.  And that’s with the power dampener.  Thor Ragnarok has *so* many problems, but at least they gave the hero a journey to go on.  And that’s accounting for the fact that he starts off pretty ridiculously powerful.  

I’m officially out of time and this is getting out of hand so I’m just going to wrap this up.  This was actually shorter than what I originally had.

[goodguyjean]

@mirandafandomette Yup! In this booklet that comes with an Armin figure, it says that “Jean dislikes that Armin is always together with Eren.” As we’ve already talked about on chat (but I haven’t talked about it on my blog before, so I’m gonna use this comment as a jumping off point, thank you lol), this booklet’s canon status vis-à-vis the manga is questionable, but I think it’s a defensible interpretation to say that Jean is at least slightly jealous of Armin and Eren’s relationship in the manga. However, I think Jean primarily dislikes their closeness because he thinks Armin underestimates his own skills as compared to Eren’s. And Jean is right, in a way, as we know from the Trost arc–Armin is surprised at the faith that Eren and Mikasa have in his abilities, worried that he’s primarily been a burden to them. The way I read it in the manga, it seems that Jean wants to be close to Armin himself, but in a way that he feels is more genuine and equal than the manner in which Eren and Armin relate. (I’m not taking a stab at Eren and Armin’s actual friendship here, only attempting to explain Jean’s initial understanding of it!)

The rest of my analysis is under the cut because I’m long-winded and I like pictures ^^’

To begin, I’m pretty sure the booklet is making a direct reference to the following scene from chapter 23:

Now, I know these panels have caused a lot of discourse, and I’m probably getting myself into hot water by bringing them up, but I feel like I eventually have to address them as a Jean/Jearmin fan (just like I inevitably had to talk about chapter 53 …), so here goes nothing. 

This scene poses a lot of difficulty of interpretation because it’s translated slightly differently each time I see it. This screen grab is from the official English translation of the manga, and it seems to be riding a pretty hard line between Jean calling Armin a sycophant who depends on a guy when he doesn’t need to, and Jean essentially saying, “No homo, like you and Eren, but you’re a pretty legit dude.” “Creeped out” and “fawn” are quite ambiguous words, and (according to a friend who reads Japanese) they’re reflecting a similar ambiguity in the original text, although most of that polysemy is apparently generated by Jean using “rude conjugations”. The gist of her reading is that she can’t definitively say Jean’s language is homophobic, but she also can’t rule it out as a possible meaning. However, the English dub of the anime (and my friend confirmed that the Japanese is the same in the anime and the manga for this scene) translates Jean’s comment as, “It always bothered me how you clung to Eren like a security blanket, but I always knew you were brilliant.” I think, based on the second half of Jean’s statement here and after consulting with my friend, that this is an equally defensible interpretation of Jean’s words. His line “I always thought you were capable” implies that his first comment is mostly about Armin relying on Eren when he really doesn’t need to; Armin is very capable on his own, and Jean sees this about him. And Armin’s response almost seems to affirm Jean’s assessment because, according to my friend, he’s also using rude speech forms! He rises to the occasion and meets Jean banter for banter. In the words of my Japanese consultant (who, I should say, doesn’t read or watch Attack on Titan), “Wow, they’re really going at each other!” 

So, keeping all of these difficulties about the language in mind, how should we interpret this scene? I’ve seen several different readings of it, but I don’t think I’ve seen one that totally captures all the nuances at play here, so I’m going to try my hand at it. Jean is saying that he is disturbed a capable or “brilliant” soldier such as Armin would waste his time on a guy like Eren–so this comment is kind of a dig at Eren too. At this point, Jean just doesn’t get Armin and Eren’s friendship, and suggests that Eren doesn’t deserve Armin’s attention. He expresses himself in strong language, in a way that implies there is something extreme about Armin’s devotion to Eren. In the manga translation there’s an implication of a romantic interest on Armin’s part, and in the anime translation Jean suggests that Armin’s reliance on Eren is childish. I prefer the anime translation in this case because I think it also speaks to a broader criticism of Eren that Jean has: that he’s not thinking of the way his choices hold back his childhood friends, who are both more capable than Eren in someways. 

Chapter 3. 

When this critique is turned on Armin for following Eren instead of Eren for leading a friend astray, the accusation becomes that he is hero-worshiping Eren at his own expense. I recognize that “no homo” is still a possible valence of this moment, but I think that doesn’t account for the full meaning of the sentence: even though you devote your efforts to Eren’s causes, your capabilities actually exceed his. Whether or not we fully agree with Jean’s assessment, that appears to be the sentiment behind his words.

There’s further context for interpreting this moment to be found in Reiner’s reaction to Jean and Armin’s exchange. 

Throughout this whole conversation, Reiner has been commenting on how supposedly selfish Jean Kirstein has suddenly starting thinking about others and acting like the member of a team. Here we get a rare personal reflection from Reiner on the change in Jean, seemingly triggered by his conversation to Armin: “Jean really is different.” Given Reiner’s response here, I think we should read Jean’s comment to be intended as a compliment, even if it comes out in a really backhanded and problematic way. Does that absolve Jean of his rudeness? No. But it gets at the core meaning of his words: he respects Armin despite the fact that he’s a confidant of Eren, Jean’s ideological rival. And in order to have come to such an opinion of Armin, Jean had to be observing him. Jean has revealed to Reiner that he has been paying more attention to his comrades than he previously let on, that he actually has respect for some of them, and that he’s willing to assist them when they need it, even at great personal risk (ex: the whole “distract the Female Titan” plan they’re about to execute). 

And perhaps we can read some jealousy in this moment too. Jean thinks Armin is too capable to be relying so much on Eren. I think, based on later scenes of Jean and Armin’s burgeoning friendship–a development which is spurred by Jean continually seeking Armin out to debate morality and strategy–that we can interpret Jean as jealous of Eren having such a talented friend, although I think it would go too far to say that Jean wants Armin to “fawn” over him like he thinks Armin “fawns” over Eren (even for a shipper like myself, I don’t think Jean would want a romantic relationship where there was a lot of fawning; it might feel disingenuous to him). Jean admires both Armin and Mikasa, and doesn’t seem to want to become their Eren so much as he wants to build his own kind of relationships with them. He sees their relationship to Eren as unequal somehow, with Eren under-appreciating their talents and support, and thoughtlessly leading them into serious danger.  So I believe he is jealous of their closeness, but not wishing for them to see him exactly as they see Eren.

As a final thought to wrap up these ramblings, Jean also seems to have a peculiar way of expressing affection for Armin where he jokingly insults him. We see him speak this way to Armin at least twice more, once at the beginning of their friendship and again when they are closer.

Chapter 33.

Chapter 82. 

Although Jean seems comfortable openly expressing his admiration for Mikasa, he tends to qualify his praise of Armin’s brains with tongue-in-cheek digs at his intelligence. This is probably due to their genders; while Jean does appear to be comfortable showing more physical affection to Armin than his other male friends, he struggles sometimes with open verbal affection. And so they have this repartee, their own particular way of communicating within their friendship that does, indeed, differ from the way Eren and Armin interact. Although there is clearly mutual affection between them (and Jean takes such care of Armin’s emotions, but that’s a subject for another post), there’s also a semi-ironic lack of “fawning”–Jean’s admiration and care for Armin is palpable, but he jokes that he’s not fawning, nope, not even a little bit! We can see here that Armin understands his meaning from the way he smiles … and Armin must feel some guilt about how he’s about to sacrifice himself for a victory at Shiganshina.

Okay, so to try to tie all of these seemingly disparate observations together into a coherent conclusion: Jean initially dislikes Eren and Armin’s closeness because he feels it undermines Armin’s own talents; he probably feels jealousy over the fact that someone like Eren has such a capable friend like Armin, even if he doesn’t want to have the same kind of friendship with Armin as Eren does; his distaste for “fawning” (even if we do want to interpret it as a homophobic dig) does not necessarily mean that his attraction to Armin does not have the potential to be romantic, only that he distrusts elaborate expressions of affection and possibly has some internalized homophobia; and that this scene fits into a pattern of Jean expressing his respect and admiration for Armin with ironic insults.