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s10127470 · 9 months ago

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A response to myst1calx

So a few weeks ago, a made a post titled The MCU Synergy Problem.

In that post, I discussed how a lot of Marvel's projects during the 2010s and 2020s have been somewhat dragged down by being constantly forced to be adjacent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

If you want to check it out for yourself, here's the link to it below.

As of right now, the post has gotten six likes and a reblog.

However, the reblog I got was essentially a written response.

And somewhat hostile one.

And weirdly enough, it was from one of the six people who liked the post.

So I'm not sure on whether or not they actually liked it or they hated it.

From the way the reblog was written, it seemed like they didn't really like it.

And in addition to that, they're also a sense of confusion as well.

So today, I decided to make a response to the person that did the reblog: myst1calx.

I'm going to respond to all the points they brought up in their reblog while trying to be as civil as possible.

Though there may be a point in this where I do seem pretty angry.

Now that we got that out of the way, let's get started.

"ok but the shows in the 2010s didnt suffer from mcu synergy because they activley fought against it"

This one is a both right and wrong.

Ultimate Spider-Man and Spider-Man (2017) are really the only shows that didn't suffer from MCU synergy.

Spidey hadn't been introduced into the MCU yet when Ultimate came out and when he was, it was during Ultimate's final season.

When Spidey wouldn't even get his own movie in the MCU until after Ultimate ended.

And Spider-Man '17 surprisingly didn't really have a whole lot of MCU influence despite lasting for most of Spidey's MCU trilogy.

It took more influence from Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man and Dan Slott's run on Amazing Spider-Man.

Avengers Assemble, despite being created just to ride off the success of the first Avengers film, didn't really have a whole lot of MCU synergy at.....for the first two seasons.

But I'll touch on that a little later.

Guardians of the Galaxy.

Dude, out of all the Marvel shows of the 2010s, this one was undoubtedly the most blatant with the MCU synergy.

I mean, just look this promotional poster.

Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. also has blatant case of MCU synergy, but in a more subtle and honestly, sinister way.

The show was about the titular Agents of S.M.A.S.H. learning how to be a family and fighting off bad guys with a variety of high-tech gadgets.

Not exactly something you would think of from a show about the Hulk of all characters.

But let's turn our attention to the villains of this show.

Out of all the villains, this show only really features 7 of the Hulk's foes.

The Leader, The Abomination, The Absorbing Man, Titania, Wendigo, Xemnu and Maestro.

Yeah! No Wrecking Crew, U-Foes, Zzzax, Madman, Bi-Beast, Gargoyle, Flux, Grey Gargoyle, Umar, Nightmare, Man-Beast, Ravage, or John Ryker.

Now compare this to the other villains included in the show.

Besides the Hulk associated villains, the other villains in show include the likes of Annihilus, Blastaar, Ego the Living Planet, Laufey, The Mole Man, Doctor Doom, Galactus and his heralds, Impossible Man, Loki, Malekith the Accursed, Dormammu, Sauron, Ronan the Accuser, The High Evolutionary, The Red Ghost and his Super-Apes, Pluto, and The Supreme Intelligence.

Upon reading this, you probably that most the villains listed here are predominately connected to the Fantastic Four, not really Hulk himself.

This, along with the aforementioned focus on family and use of technology, has led many people to theorize that Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. was originally meant to be a new Fantastic Four cartoon, but was changed to be a Hulk cartoon at some point development.

The potential reason for this was that this show did come out right at the beginning of Marvel's "The Fantastic Four and X-Men don't matter anymore" phase because of the whole movie rights bullshit.

And while there hasn't been any official confirmation about this theory from any who has worked on the show, the connections are still quite apparent.

As for why they decided to make Hulk the star of the show instead if they couldn't use the Fantastic Four, I guess besides the fact he's among the most prominent allies of the Four, it was because he was the only other option that people could see working with this premise.

The other ones that could possibly fit this would be The Avengers and maybe Spider-Man, but they already had their own shows going on around that time.

So all in all, the MCU synergy did affect most of the 2010s shows.

Some were definitely more apparent than others, but still.

"if you wanna make the claim that its all mcu synergy, you can see it starting in 2017, not 13"

Now this one is weird because a good chunk of the MCU synergized elements that occured in the comics happened before 2017.

-The current, obviously MCU-inspired Loki was introduced in 2011

-Hawkeye with the tired dad energy was introduced in 2012

-The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver happened in 2015

-Literally everything with the Guardians of the Galaxy in 2015

I think maybe they were trying to say that the MCU synergy became more apparent starting in 2017, which.....yeah, they are kinda right about that.

But I reason I say this is a weird statement is because what myst1calx says later in their reblog.

Which I'll get to.

"also advertising doesnt always mean mcu syndication slop dude"

Dude, I never said anything about the advertisement for the MCU being the same as MCU synergy slock.

Advertising for the MCU is perfectly fine. I mean, Marvel would want their project to do well, right?

But the problem is using a piece of Marvel media that isn't connected to the MCU and having it resemble the MCU.

It just doesn't allow it the product to stand on it's own.

"like dont bring avengers assemble and aos and usm into this"

Why shouldn't?

Avengers Assemble does play a part in the MCU synergy problem.

I didn't even mention Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. at all in my post.

And for Ultimate Spider-Man.....

I only brought up the comic for a point I was making about a weird similarity I noticed between most modern non-MCU projects and most recent Spider-Man media.

And if we're talking about the cartoon, I literally just said it didn't suffer from any MCU synergy at all.

"this is entierly a thing that started with the 2017 uni and it comics. just correcting because i'm tire dof the whole “ mcu syndication rhetoric” when talking about aa it's so fucking annoying"

The MCU synergy has been around before 2017, they think were just saying that it became before prominent and explicit than before.

But the whole "MCU syndication rhetoric" when about AA.....

While yes, Avengers Assemble may not have the most blatant case of MCU synergy out of the non-MCU TV shows of the 2010s (Guardians of the Galaxy say "hi" again.), it's hard not to mention it as it does play a big part in that show.

From the content within the show, to literally why the show was made in the first place.

"look at the comics or anything from like. idk 2017 onwards."

This one I do agree (sort of).

I don't what the comics have to do with AA (they're completely different continuities), but I do know that the MCU synergy has gotten worse with the comics since 2017.

I mean for God's sake, the latest case of this was just last year with Ms. Marvel being retconned into a mutant.

"like you COULD make a claim abt this but honestly i see it more as you guys just not liking new shit"

But I like some of the new Marvel shit.....

the Insomniac Spider-Man games, the Spider-Verse films, Midnight Suns, those Marvel animes, and that upcoming Marvel Rivals game.

Hell, I actually like Avengers Assemble as well.

I know I didn't mention it in my post, I actually do like this show a lot.

I know it's not as good as the show that came before it, The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, but I still acknowledge it merits and enjoy it as its own thing.

But most of the other non-MCU projects I'm just not that wild about.

Since let's be real, they're kinda just.....

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"like being fr, have you ever watched or played any of these games or do you see that at face value"

Yes, I have watched and played both Avengers and Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite.

And both of these are just not that good.

While they're definitely not the worst games ever, they're just nothing really home to write home about.

For Avengers, this game was pure wasted potential.

I mean, Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics had access to an IP that at the time of acquiring it, had over 50 years worth of history!

That IP had hundreds of comics with numerous storylines worth adapting, an enormous roster of characters, a multitude of other iterations to easily take some influence from, and most of all, a movie franchise that helped make it into the powerhouse it is today.

But with all that, they found some way to screw it up!

The plot is nothing home to rave about. It's just you're standard "getting the band back together" plot.

The graphics are....passable. Just your standard very realistic-looking game.

The gameplay is repetitive as all hell and fails at making any of the characters feel distinct from one another.

The bonus content is a total joke. I mean putting aside the obvious micro-transactions, most of the purchasable costumes absolutely suck. They're either just half-assed attempts at recreating outfits from whatever source material they came from, or just recolors of each other.

And most of all, the game has some of the most pitiful representation of the Marvel Universe ever put to screen.

I mean, can you name any notable locations from the comics that was featured in the game?

The only one was Wakanda, but even that could've been done a little better.

There was no Asgard or any of the other Nine Realms, no Latveria, no Kamar-Taj, no Dark Dimension, no Atlantis, no Savage Land.

Hell, we don't even get to go to New York! Despite the fact that like 90% of the Marvel characters are based there.

All we got were primarily generic-looking bases, deserts and forests (occasionally with some snow).

And in my post, I mentioned that there was a list of playable characters planned to be in the game.

In addition to Spider-Man and Hawkeye, this list included the likes of Ant-Man, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Captain Mar-Vell, Daisy Johnson, Doctor Strange, The Falcon, Kate Bishop, Mockingbird, Scarlet Witch, She-Hulk, The Vision, The Wasp, War Machine, and the Winter Soldier.

But only five characters from that list made it into that game, plus the Jane Foster Thor, which let's be real, that was only done just to coincidence with the release of Thor: Love and Thunder.

You can't tell me that the roster we got by the time the game finished updating was better than the one that was initially planned.

And I reason I say this game was pure wasted potential was because.....look at who the Avengers have had as members over the decades!

People don't seem to know this a lot or ever really acknowledge it, but the Avengers are like a melting pot, as they've had members from basically every corner of the Marvel Universe!

Heroes from the mystical side like the aforementioned Doctor Strange, Hercules, Black Knight and White Tiger.

Heroes from the cosmic side like the aforementioned Captain Marvels, Monica Rambeau, Moondragon and Nova.

Several street-level heroes like the aforementioned Spider-Man, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones and Shang-Chi.

A couple of mutants have been members like Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch and even members of the X-Men, namely Wolverine, Beast and Storm.

Hell. Literally every member of the Fantastic Four has been a member of the Avengers at one point!

Like, does anyone else see the potential I'm bringing up?!

There could've easily been several DLCs that got to explore much greater Marvel Universe.

But alas, we never got that....

As for Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite....

Jesus....

Apart from the admittedly decent gameplay, there's just nothing else good about this game.

The graphics totally suck. They threw away the gorgeous cel-shaded, comic book-inspired look from 3: Fate of Two Worlds for this bland, kinda ugly pseudo-realistic look for the sake of just like damn-near everything else in that game: MCU synergy.

Not to mention they look pretty cheap, especially in the cutscenes.

The reason being that this game had a pretty low budget.....and it really shows.

The music was mid, since, once again, they changed many of the characters themes in order to make it more MCU-inspired.

And while I do respect that this game is the first one in the series to have a story-mode, it's unfortunate that the story-mode sucks.

The plot was just so lame and was obviously riding the hype for the then-upcoming Avengers: Infinity War.

And I already brought up the absolute disgrace of a roster and the behind-the-scenes drama of this game in my poster.

All in all, these games may not be the worst games of all time, but they're just not worth anyone's time or money.

If you like these games, more power to ya.

"because i see more misconceptions about characters in deisgn and charaterizations in the 2010s morethan anything"

I'm not sure about this one.

Most of the stuff I said about the designs and characterizations in the comics is largely truly.

But maybe one of them was possibly exaggerated and not nearly as prevalent as most people make it out to be.

"and the thing is is that marvel will just keep doing this bullshit because you guys keep buying into it"

I just pointed it out that most of the stuff on the designs and characterizations is largely true.

It almost feels like they're trying to downplay just how prevalent the MCU synergy is in the comics.

Which is weird since they just admitted early with how prevalent the MCU synergy is in the comics!

And also.....

Fuck off with that bullshit.

Don't blame this on the fans.

They're (mostly) not the ones clamoring for this MCU synergy!

Marvel is doing this on their own term and are obviously doing this to appeal to more contemporary fans who got introduced to Marvel through the MCU.

And as I mentioned in my post, I'm convinced that the people at Marvel believe these guys have never heard of the word: adaptation.

Not only that, but they also seem to believe that these fans will get confused that the comics don't line-up with the movies 1-to-1.

And trust me, this isn't the first time something like this has happened with Marvel.

"this doesnt work for most of the shows pre 2016 in the 2010s marvel area because they didnt suffer from it until marvel started forcing it on them for maximum profits #which then ended up biting them in the ass when avengers assemble fans dropped the show after relazing that s5 became shitty mcu syndication"

Now this part is true.

The MCU synergy started to become much more prominent roughly around 2016/2017.

I already went into how this negatively affected stuff like Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, but let's head back to the main focus of this part, Avengers Assemble.

Although AA was created to obviously ride the wave of success caused by the first Avengers film, it surprisingly had very little MCU synergy....for, as I mentioned earlier, the first two seasons.

The only examples I can think of from the first two seasons was when they recreated the Chitauri in the Impossible Man, and a few references that got turned on their head like when Hulk tries to punch Thor, but he blocks it with Mjolnir.

But when season 3 came around....that's when everything changed.

During that season, it was pretty apparent they were really striving to be more like the MCU than in prior seasons.

The season featured Ultron as the main antagonist be he was in the latest Avengers movie at time, Age of Ultron.

Despite the fact that when the season premiered, Age of Ultron for almost a year at that point....

The Avengers got new outfits, pulled directly from the movies.

Hulk and Black Widow had something going on between them....like in the movies.

Klaw, who first appeared in Ultimate Spider-Man (which is connected to AA), receives a major redesign, looking like how he did in the movies, whereas before, he looked like how did in the comics.

The last four episodes were based off Civil War (I wonder why?).

They move their headquarters to a compound....once again, like in the movies.

And they predominately featured the Inhumans as recurring characters, since this was back when Marvel were trying to push them as the next big characters in order to replace the X-Men and promote their then-upcoming movie.

Which ended up getting cancelled and got replaced by a shitty TV show....which was cancelled after just one season.

In Season 4, this synergy was thankfully less present.

There was aforementioned Falcon redesign.

And Doctor Strange got one as well, to look more like how he did in the movies.

But then came along Season 5....

Dear God....

Not only was the MCU synergy just as prevalent as it was in Season 3 (maybe even more so, especially with the fact that it was heavily focused on Black Panther), but it even took place in a completely different continuity.

Yep! Season 5 was completely removed from the previous 4 seasons!

And to make matters worse, it was set in the same universe as Spider-Man 2017.....and Guardians of the Galaxy!

Which itself was connected to the first 4 seasons of AA.

HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK?!

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"this didnt START from the 2010s. it started midway throu"

Once again, the MCU synergy has been around since the early 2010s.

It was only at the midway point of that decade where started to become more prevalent than before.

And outside of the comics, the earliest case I think of for this was with EMH, which had Iron Man acting exactly like how he did in the movies.

Hell, even Hulk looked pretty similar to how he did in his solo film everybody forgot about.

"and creeped its way in because you guys LET IT HAPPEN"

Once again, fuck off with that bullshit.

"half of the things mentioned arent even mcu syndicationy they just suffer from current realisitc game trends that we are the norm"

I can definitely tell they're talking about Square Enix's Avengers.

But in all honesty, but game didn't really have a whole lot of MCU synergy.

It was still there, specifically with how the characters look.

I mean, everyone has said it before, but the Avengers looked like the stunt doubles for the MCU actors.

But it wasn't as prevalent as some of the other Marvel media to feature it.

Doesn't really make it much better though.

The game is honestly sort of a Schrodinger's video game, where doesn't take much from the comics or any other iterations of the Avengers, but doesn't take much from the MCU either.

"like what is your point here? “oh not every marvel property is the same is the comics” dude nobody buys comic shit because they arent as easy to get into the manga you guys perpetuate this shit and then wonder why cb fandoms are always filled with normies"

And here we are....

Now this is the last part of the reblog, and the one that really annoys me the most.

My point of that post was to show how not only was the constant MCU synergy incredibly tiring, but also been doing a lot of harm to their recent projects that aren't connected to the MCU.

Like, Avengers Assemble could've gone down as one of the greatest Marvel cartoons ever made!

But it got bogged down by the MCU synergy of the later seasons.

So much so that the final season wasn't even connected to the previous ones!

And now, it's usually just seen as the "we have the MCU at home" show.

And I do I even need to bring up Infinite into this?

And not only that, but it's also been bringing out the worst in Marvel.

I mean, just look at my post and read up on how much they made Capcom suffer during the production of Infinite.

But the synergy has not only harmed potentially good projects and lead to promising upcoming projects to be thrown to the Shadow Realm, but even good projects in unintentional ways.

The Guardians of the Galaxy video game was really good and the people who played it all agreed that this was what Avengers should've been!

But despite the positive reception, the game ended up flopping hard.

And while this was largely thanks to the failure of Avengers (since Guardians was also produced by Square Enix), I feel like the growing annoying towards MCU synergy may've played a part in this as well.

Since remember: out of all the characters of Marvel, the Guardians have been the ones undoubtedly changed by the MCU the most.

It's like....not even a contest.

And not only is this synergy doing harm to their non-MCU projects, but also gonna start (and it's possibly already has been) doing harm to the Marvel brand itself.

This is largely because of how homogenized they've made everything, which is not gonna be helping them because of rapidly declining interest in the MCU (aka Marvel Fatigue).

I mean, last year was just not a good year for them.

Besides Guardians of the Galaxy 3, two other films that released that year (Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels).

Both those films were met critically with what could be described as a resounding "meh".

But the real damage came in their box office.

Quantumania was a box-office disappointment, grossing $476.1 million worldwide against a gross production budget of $326.6 million, being one of the few MCU films not to break even in its theatrical run.

And The Marvels.....

Oh man, The Marvels....

That film was a box-office bomb! Grossing $206 million worldwide against a gross production budget of $274.8 million. And it now holds the record for being the lowest-grossing film in the franchise's history!

That had to be hurting Marve!

And it seems so as just recently, Marvel Studios announced they would be limiting the amount of MCU projects they release a year.

And while Marvel largely targeted towards the MCU itself, I feel like could also potentially start harming non-MCU projects.

Since let's be real, one of the many issues people have had with the recent MCU is how formulaic and generic it's become.

From the trademark forced and frankly mediocre humor, to having damn-near every threat be potentially world-ending.

I'm pretty sure the same could be applied to what people usually expect from a modern non-MCU project.

It's gonna have a semi-realistic art-style.

It's gonna feature the big characters (Avengers, Guardians and Spider-Man) featured in the MCU and barely anyone else (Fantastic Four, X-Men, street-level heroes).

They're all gonna be wearing their MCU outfits.

Every character is gonna be a quippy asshole (expect the ones who are suppose to be quippy assholes like Hawkeye and Spider-Man).

And it's gonna have a world-ending threat, with either Loki or Thanos as the main villain.

(Maybe Ultron if you're lucky)

And if this keep going, I'm sure Kang the Conquerer will essentially become the next villain to always be the main villain.

Well, if he's still going to be used in the MCU....

On to the next point.

“oh not every marvel property is the same is the comics”

Okay.

This has been a topic of debate when it comes to comic book adaptations for years.

Whether or not all comic book adaptations should strive to be like, 100% faithful to the source material.

To me, I think the answer to this is, in the words of the Pirate Captain,....

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If this is for a series like Watchmen, 300 and Invincible, I feel like you should definitely make the adaptation as faithful as possible.

But even then, there would be definitely be some changes to the source material, since they would have story elements that were either weak or just plain bad.

Basically, maybe people's ideas on adaptations is to utilize what works, and either strengthen or get rid of what doesn't.

But when doing an adaptation for the big dogs like DC and Marvel.....this is where things get really tricky.

Because DC and Marvel have ongoing continuities with no end in sight, doing a largely faithful adaptation of any of their characters' stories would be an absolute nightmare since that characters will often have literal DECADES of history, plus hundreds to thousands of comics to read in order to understand said history.

If you've noticed, a lot of adaptations of DC and Marvel aren't exactly 1-to-1 adaptations of the stories from the comics.

But the reason why they're held in such high regard is because in spite of that, they manage to stay faithful to the spirit, tone and characterizations of the comics.

And even then, they will still adapt storylines and elements from the comics, but just little more streamlined.

Essentially, the best way I can describe how adaptations of DC and Marvel work is that they use the comics as a basis (along with other iterations) and essentially strive for something that's familiar while still being different.

For example, let's look at some of the Batman cartoons.

Although having some similarities, the three shows I'm about to bring up are still largely different from each other.

Batman: The Animated Series focused on the adventures of an already experienced Batman (having been at this gig for years and already knowing his villains) and his relationships with those around him.

The Batman, while somewhat similar to its predecessor, is focused on a younger and slightly-less experienced Batman learning to become a better hero.

And Batman: The Brave and Bold, is completely different from the prior two shows as it's focused on Batman's adventures interacting with the much greater DC Universe, specifically the lesser-known side.

But despite that, from watching these shows, you can still tell that they all used the comics (along with other iterations) as a basis and just built upon that in unique ways.

Contrast that with many of the non-MCU projects/products of the 2010s, which were obviously using the movies as a basis....and nothing really else.

And not only is this limiting to what these projects could do, but it's also kind of disingenuous.

Remember, the Marvel characters existed DECADES before the MCU even came around.

But to see Marvel not really even bothering to utilize said source material (in addition to constantly trying to alter it for the sake of brand synergy) is kind of a dick move.

And as I stated before, they're obviously doing to this to appeal to a certain demographic.

All companies have done this before.

And that certain demographic are the people who got into Marvel via the MCU.

And that leads us to the tail end of this part.

I get it.

It's REALLY hard to get into comics, specifically of the big two: DC and Marvel, especially the latter.

This is largely because of how long their characters have been around.

And if that wasn't intimidating enough, these characters will often have multiple runs (sometimes running at once) and that can last to hundreds, even thousands of issues!

Though not all comics books are like that.

Namely the limited series ones.

Hell, even franchises that have had multiple comic runs like Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Sonic the Hedgehog surprisingly don't have this issue.

In spite of having multiple comics runs, the reason they don't suffer is because each one (no matter how long they've ran for) usually takes place in a completely different continuity from the other.

And also, using the term "normies" is so lame and kind of insulting.

I mean, I thought that term died back in like 2016.

A better term for these people would be "contemporary fans".

But anyway, contemporary fans shouldn't be blamed for people not buying comics much anymore.

If anything, the blame should be more placed towards the companies themselves for not really having anything that could help ease them into the world of these characters and, as I mentioned before, constantly changing the continuity of the comics in order to make it easier for those fans to get into (which ironically I think actually makes it harder).

Like, remember back in the 2000s and the early 2010s, when Marvel used to have to storybooks, novels and encyclopedias that went into detail on the backgrounds of the Marvel characters.

I'm pretty sure that helped a lot of contemporary fans of that era get a good understanding of the Marvel characters.

And I'm sure it can work for the contemporary fans of today as well.

Well that's all I have to say.

This isn't meant be a call-out post, I just wanted to response to the points myst1calx brought up in their reblog.

And while writing for this, I kinda feel like I should've gone more in-depth on some of my points in the original post.

And even then, I do feel like they are confused on some points I made in the post.

But anyway, myst1calx, if you are reading this, I do hope we can reach a better understanding on this whole topic.

And if I sounded somewhat angry at some points, I do apologize for that.

But other than that, I'm gonna go eat something to eat.

Peace.

#response #rant post #personal rant #marvel cinematic universe #mcu synergy #marvel #marvel comics #avengers assemble #but seriously though #i am genuinely excited for marvel rivals!

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oliviaeatworld · 3 months ago

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Actual blog introduction under cut ha ha sorry guys

Lots of words you don’t have to read if you don’t want to BUTT here are some rules for my blog before I get into anything else!!

- Absolutely do NOT interact with me if you support cloneshipping or proshipping or incest of any kind!!! Please respectfully block me. I hope you understand- it makes me very uncomfortable

- I want to keep this an SFW blog, but there will be a bit of gore and horror here! If you’re not a fan of that, I totally get it. I will tag whatever posts that have anything like that with a warning

- Finally not really a rule but I use any pronouns. I’ll discuss this further under cut if you want to read

Firstly here are some things about this blog!!

You’ll be seeing mostly Star Wars: The Bad Batch, but lately I’ve been treating myself to a little FNaF. I also reblog some Roblox content, including Pressure and Regretevator. Also Jerma985. Love him. And some of my favorite bands / music artists. I’ll list all of the fandoms I’m in at the bottom of the post if you want to scroll down to see! You can navigate my blog with the search!! I tag pretty much everything. You don’t have to read past here if you don’t want to.

My name is Olivia!! It’s my user so maybe you could have assumed that BUT you can also call me Michael/Mike. I know they’re pretty different names but just have fun with it! I’d be delighted to be referred to as Mike

My best friend is @lonestar64 !! Actually the coolest person I’ve ever met . LOVE YOU

Sibling is @hababapapa . Big Two-Face enjoyer. You’re ok

I am neurodivergent

I am agender!! That may seem confusing if you’re not sure what it means but basically I’m kind of just here and not confining to any gender, so any pronouns are totally okay with me. Go crazy!! Neopronouns are fun too! Literally! Knock yourself out!

I am a huge fan of lots of horror. I ADORE zombies, skeletons and werewolves. Mostly zombies. But I’ve got a vast collection of skeleton themed items cause they’re really neat. And Spider-Man items. My favorite color is red. Like of all time. It’s a huge part of who I am and basically everything I own is red. I also like to doodle and stuff. I love Edgar Allan Poe’s work and my favorite is the Tell-Tale Heart (it’s popular for a reason!! I adore it!)

I love music!! I play the bass guitar (4 years now!) and the upright bass (only 2). My favorite artists are TOOL, A Perfect Circle, Megadeth, Candlemass, Type O Negative, Death, Will Wood (and his tapeworms), Muse, Black Sabbath, Stone Temple Pilots, and Nine Inch Nails. That’s not in any particular order.

My favorite animals are in my bio. I love animals. And dinosaurs too. My favorite of all time are bats. Then mice and rats. I may be purchasing pet rats soon. I love them.

OKAY we made it to the ultimate list of fandoms I have been/am in. Don’t be afraid to talk to me about any of these if you’re in the fandom too!! I’d love to talk about any of these they’re all very dear to me

CURRENTLY IN AND POSTING ABOUT

The Bad Batch

Five Nights at Freddy’s

Roblox - Pressure and Regretevator

Rambo

those are the main ones you’ll see a lot HERES THE REST

Team Fortress 2

Animaniacs (Pinky and the Brain mostly)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Marvel - Spidey, Venom, Deadpool, some X-Men

Bendy and the Ink Machine

The Walten Files

Penguins of Madagascar (I think I know the most about this one. I have the entire script for their movie memorized, and it might be like the oldest interest I have besides FNaF.)

Thank you for making it this far I LOVE YOU!! ROCK ON!! Mice for your troubles

#intro post #introduction #blog intro #olivia thinks aloud #the bad batch #star wars #tbb #five nights at freddy's #JUST SO U KNOW WHAT IM GONNA TALK ABOUT #Hello again tumblr #i’ve been here a little while Butt wanted to redo my old intro #thanks

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jakethesequel · 5 months ago

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I really thought the end of the Krakoan Era of X-Books would cause a significant downturn in how many Marvel comics I keep up with weekly, but they've just got so many great writers on the payroll right now! Like, I've cut out all the X-Books except X-Men proper (which I'm only reading because of my longtime crush on Magik) after keeping up with everything during Krakoa, so you'd expect I'd be taking my Marvel more slowly, but just look at the lineup:

My man Jonathan Hickman killing it on Ultimate Spider-Man (honestly doing it better than 616 Spidey) plus apparently an upcoming Wolverine mini, and joined by rising star Deniz Camp on Ultimates doing real interesting stuff with Marvel hero archetypes (the recent issue touching on nuclear testing fallout in Polynesia reminding me of his incredible comic 20th Century Men, which is probably better than any Marvel comic mentioned here, go read it right now!) for a real dream team;

The always impressive Al Ewing keeping Venom's energy high following up a massive crossover event (a tall task), while also crafting a landmark run in Immortal Thor just like he did for Immortal Hulk previously;

Jed MacKay with the unenviable job of writing both X-Men AND Avengers after finishing his recent run on Doctor Strange, but despite those heavy hitter titles his standout work has been his several-year-run on Moon Knight (and spinoffs Vengeance of the [MK], Phases of the [MK]) which I think is going to be remembered as one of the character's better runs (despite it having to handle the leftovers of the controversial Age of Khonshu);

Garth Ennis (who can be very hit or very miss for me) back in his element on the Get Fury mini despite the success of The Boys' TV show, a MAX universe Vietnam war story with Nick Fury and Frank Castle, exactly the kind of thing you want Ennis writing (he's even so far avoided his unfortunate habit of transmisogynistic humour);

And certainly not least, Ryan North (of tumblr @ryannorth fame) on Fantastic Four, easily the best work on the title since Hickman's defining run in the lead-up to Secret Wars (2015), calling back to the weird-science-fiction-family-adventure vibes of the original run by Jack Kirby (...and Stan Lee, whatever...), and the only series on this list I actually went out and bought a floppy for instead of reading digitally (issue #7/LGY700, because I love Dr. Doom and North fucking nailed depicting his character, which is a trickier task than people expect), PLUS: the first two years/24 issues of this run has beautiful cover art by industry legend Alex Ross, what more can you need from a comic book!‽?

DC's got some good stuff coming out too (Zdarsky Batman, Spurrier Flash & Hellblazer, Russel/Allred Batman: Dark Age, personal fav JT4's Nice House by the Sea, and I always love Action/Superman), but the Marvel bullpen is just in top fuckin' gear recently.

#comics #marvel #spider-man #ultimates #venom #thor #x-men #the avengers #moon knight #nick fury #the punisher #fantastic four

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episodicnostalgia · 9 months ago

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Reading Break: “Retiring” from comic book collecting

The Reading Break continues, mainly because work is still hindering my ability to write structured reviews with any regularity. It’s a bit of a bummer, because I genuinely enjoy writing them, and it’s made blogging fun for me, but doing so requires more mental energy than I can currently afford to spend. Sometimes you just gotta prioritize payin’ them bills, and staying alive. In the meantime, I don’t want to sacrifice writing altogether, because I value this platform as an outlet, and since it is MY flippin’ blog, I figure I’ll just relax the structure a bit and write about other shit; less episodic, and more nostalgic, I suppose.

So anyways. Comic Books.

More of my leisure time has been spent reading comics these days, and if you’ve been tuning into any of my most recent posts, then you already know that I’ve been on something of a Spider-man kick for a while, and that’s unlikely to change in the immediate future. Obviously, the fact that I’ve been reviewing the 90’s cartoon has fanned the flames of my current fixation, but it’s been a long time coming. Over the past few years I’ve been casually focused on completing my ideal Spidey-Comics-collection, and I’m very nearly finished.

Incidentally, that also means that I will also be, by-and-large, finished actively collecting comic books altogether.

Technically I kind of “stopped collecting” (heavy on the quotations there) shortly after DC’s ‘New 52’ reboot kicked off. It wasn’t that I particularly disliked the changes, but I found myself lacking the energy to maintain my interest. Since Marvel wasn't exactly doing anything more appealing (and the MCU was still scratching that itch), I just stopped altogether. To this day, I haven’t really felt that I’ve been missing out.

I’m still prone to casually glancing at subreddits, Wikipedia blogs, and the occasional review/pop-culture think piece, just to check in on all my old fictional friends, and see how they’re doing. Superman and Lois have a kid who grew up, and also became another Superman. Batman and Catwoman got married, and then unmarried, I think? I know it resulted a in a bunch of fans getting angry. I understand Miles Morales has been transported to the 616 universe (after his was destroyed), and I seem to recall that Wolverine was dead for a while. Maybe he still is?

I admittedly I did start reading the new Ultimate Spider-man, and intend to continue doing so, but I’ll drop it in a heartbeat if I get bored, meanwhile the other books in the new ‘Ultimate’ line don’t really appeal at all. I’m not trying be pretentious either; All the new stuff being published today looks like it’s probably reasonably entertaining, and there are some fantastic new artists working in the industry, but I’ve just mostly had my fill.

That said, there were a decent number of older issues that I’d always wanted to read when I was a kid, but never got to. So, shortly after I stopped buying any of the new books coming out (a little over a decade ago), I began removing the issues that I had no intention of re-reading, to make room for the various ‘missing’ issues I needed to complete my "essential" collection once and for all.

After all, is any reading list complete without Super-merman?

During my comic-hunt, there are two characters who I predominantly focused on: Superman (Merman or otherwise) & Spider-man (there are no Spider-mermen. Because that would be stupid.)

Two-or-three years ago, I successfully completed my collection of Superman comics ranging between late 1986 to early 1995. That’s the era that includes, among other things:

Lex faking his death, swapping his brain into an enhanced clone body, and returning with a full head of hair as his own super hot, Secret, Australian-raised son, aka Lex Luthor II. I’m not making any of that up, but it’s actually a great Lex Luthor arc, and I mean that unapologetically.

Lois getting engaged to Clark, and being trusted with his super-secret. (And also, hilariously, in that order.)

The artificial protoplasmic lifeform aka ‘Matrix-Supergirl’ from “the pocket dimension,” who easily ranks as my favourite iteration of the Supergirl property.

The evil Kryptonian AI aka “The Eradicator,” and of course…

The world-famous ‘Death of Superman’

As ridiculously 90’s as that all sounds (and was), it was a truly solid 8-year run that has (in my millennial opinion) never been matched for its combined quality, diverse-and-dynamic supporting cast (which no other set of writers have ever come close to utilizing as effectively), and tight continuity. Most importantly, by the beginning of ‘95, the story sort-of comes to a natural close that leaves our characters happy, with most of the major arcs and plotlines resolved.

That itself is nothing short of a small miracle for an ongoing comic book series to achieve, and so I’ve always privately considered that to be "the end" of MY definitive Superman story. That respective collection begins with ‘Man of Steel’ #1, spans across the four Superman books of-the-time (plus select mini-series, annuals, and crossovers), and ends with ‘Action Comics’ #706, some 350-odd issues later.

It's an impressive achievement in storytelling that seems to finally be getting more recognition (from what I’ve seen on various forums and subreddits), but I still don’t think it gets enough credit for allowing our beloved Kryptonian’s story to move forward for (arguably) the first time in the character’s then-50+ years of existence. Suffice to say, while it was no small feat tracking down each of the necessary back-issues, it was relatively simple process to figure out WHICH issues I needed to buy, since it was all part of one consecutive run.

Finishing my Spider-man Collection was a little trickier.

Technically, the Spider-man books have never broken their continuity (with some room for debate, but I don’t feel like getting into that), and as such, any truly complete collection of the 616* Spider-man would span several thousand issues, many of which I don't consider essential reading. So it’s been a longer, more meticulous process of figuring out which artists, writers, and story arcs I actually want to sink money into.

[*616 = The OG Marvel universe from the comics]

With a few exceptions (and where I’ve had to accept trade paperback collections as a vital alternative to spending at LEAST several tens-of-thousands of dollars), I’ve now collected nearly all of the main eras throughout Spidey’s career that interest me. I’ve very nearly completed the Roger Stern run, along with a healthy sampling of Tom Defalco’s work, leaving me roughly 10 issues away from my goal.

If you care to know, it comes to the equivalent of some 420+ issues from the various 616 Spidey books, between Amazing Fantasy #15, to The Amazing Spider-man #508.

Why stop there? Because much of what has come out beyond that point feels either like a departure from, or a retread of, the character I grew up with. I don’t begrudge anyone who enjoys the current Spidey books, but he seems to have been stuck in a holding pattern that TPTB have decided the writers aren't permitted to move beyond. I imagine that’s also why the new ‘Ultimate Spider-man’ has captured my interest, at least for the time being, by letting him grow up and raise a family. Still, I won’t be surprised if/when even that version of the character ends up getting caught in his own version of an editorially-mandated limbo.

In the end, that’s what it really boils down to, the lack of endings. I won’t pretend I’m making a new observation in this regard, since most ongoing series are tailor made to reset every few years, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Even so, knowing when to end a story is as important to me as the plot itself, and since the writers aren’t ever granted the power to offer definitive endings to major proprietary characters, I decided to pick one that I can be content with. I find doing so makes going back and re-reading these stories from the beginning more enjoyable, since I know it will eventually end on my terms.

Speaking of ending things, It’s probably time I wrapped up this post. It’s possible I might come back with more specific observations about the Spidey books, depending on how long my “reading break" continues. Or maybe by the time I’m back, I’ll be able to focus on the reviews again.

Guess we'll see.

Thanks for Reading.

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twistedtummies2 · 2 years ago

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The Devils I Know - Number 25

Welcome to “The Devils I Know!” For this spooky time of year, from now till Halloween, I’ll be counting down My Top 31 Depictions of the Devil, from movies, television, video games, and more! Today’s Devil is a Marvel to behold. Number 25 is…Mephisto, from Marvel Comics

It stands to reason that comic book superheroes would have to face the Devil at some point. In fact, throughout both DC and Marvel comics, just to name two, there have multiple demons and devil-like characters throughout their many series and issues. We’ll get to DC’s chief Devil in the future, but for now, let’s focus on Marvel’s arch-ruler of Hell: Mephisto.

Now, I’m going to be up front and honest…I haven’t really read very many comics with Mephisto. Again, I’m actually not that well-versed in comics THEMSELVES, I mostly know things about characters from other media. And unfortunately, Mephisto is one of those characters who hasn’t necessarily been treated that great in other media: he’s never shown up in any TV shows properly (somewhat surprisingly), and so far the only movies he’s been in were the two Ghost Rider films starring Nicolas Cage. And while both of those takes on the character were played by good actors (Peter Fonda for the first, Ciaran Hinds for the latter), neither picture did the character any favors. Although I DO want to say that Fonda’s Devil in the first film was, for me, the best part of a generally bad movie. Well…him and the Spiderbait cover of the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” but that’s another story. The character has had some better success in video games – perhaps most notably “Marvel: Ultimate Alliance” and the “Marvel vs. Capcom” series – but ultimately, it’s the comics where he shines most, and I just haven’t read many of those. HOWEVER, based on the ones I HAVE read, it’s really a shame Mephisto hasn’t popped up in more places, because he’s honestly one of the most fiendish villains Marvel has ever had. Intricately tied to the origins of Ghost Rider, and a frequent nemesis of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and the Silver Surfer alike, Mephisto is one of the most impactful adversaries in the comics themselves. He is the classic Devil, so to speak: a vengeful and devious creature of fire and spite who loves to tempt mortals to the dark side, offering them wonderful things for a terrible price. Perhaps his most infamous appearance so far, outside of Ghost Rider, was the highly controversial storyline “One More Day,” in which Peter Parker (of all people) made a deal with Mephisto to alter all of space and time…and if you thought things went badly when he tried something like that in the movie “No Way Home” with Doctor Strange, you ain’t seen NOTHIN’ unless you read that storyline. Seriously, Peter, that was…a really, REALLY bad decision, I’m not backing you up there. Nope. Controversial stories aside, it really is a shame Mephisto hasn’t shown up in more stuff, because with what I’ve read, he’s a very fun and delightfully scheming version of the Devil, as well as an incredibly powerful adversary. He was actually able to very nearly beat FREAKING GALACTUS in one story, I’m not joking. He’d be higher on the list, if I just had more familiarity than I already do with his comic book portrayal. As for DC’s Devil…well…again, that’s another story.

Tomorrow, the countdown continues with Number 24! HINT: “One of these things is not like the others.”

#top 31 devils #the devils i know #number 25 #october special #halloween advent calendar #countdown #list #fiction #comics #marvel #mephisto #ghost rider #spider-man

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land-of-brains-and-chocolate · 4 years ago

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Rec list for Eddie and Symby being vaguely to very gay?

I'm sorry for coming to you with my monsterfucker agenda 😔👊 (no I'm not)

i mean, i probably could’ve seen this coming.

venom is dominated by two opposing narratives. let’s call this the “relationship narrative” and the “control narrative”. they’re not perfectly separated, like, you’ll definitely get elements of one in the other, but generally one of them describes what the story, at its core, is using the symbiote for.

now comics are an endless tug-of-war at the best of times, much less the gayest and slimiest of times. there’s a neverending backlash and backbacklash going on between these two takes. what you want is the relationship narrative.

everything very much started out with that take. eddie and the symbiote are two characters who forge an evil alliance because it lets them do what they wanna do (kill spider-man, more or less) and they have the same kinds of neuroses and complexes and syndromes. lots of early comics are also very fun about the merged consciousness, merged identity deal. that’s kind of the textbook relationship stuff.

personally i absolutely think the original stories (venom was created by david michelinie) have romantic undertones, even starting in the villainy days. eddie describes their first meeting as “a shadow moved, caressed me.” he takes the rejection of the symbiote still being “in love with” spider-man really hard. he sobs his eyes out when he thinks it’s dead and promises to avenge it bare-handed. they totally expect to live happily ever after on a deserted island together.

then there’s venom: lethal protector, which is cute on its own, but if you’re reading for slime romance, i very specifically recommend the novelisation. i won’t even spoil it. and then, planet of the symbiotes is the first comic that i would say has outright queer themes, intentional or not.

so all those recs until now are collected in this post.

we're trucking along through the 90s, we explore elements of one take and then the other and sometimes we ignore the symbiote completely, but not too much changes, overall. the next BIG stop in Gay Venom is, of course, the hunger.

miniseries by len kaminski, just venom: the hunger. plenty of people have written their essays on it, but what’s always important to me is that it DID NOT come out of nowhere. as said above, it expanded on themes that were there, it references michelinie venom very explicitly, like you get your SECOND “tenderly touching the green glass tube” scene.

but yes this one is specifically about, like, stigmatisation, otherness, mental illness, meeting all those things with care and empathy and optimism, tentacle sex. again, many essays. a venom comic that can go “look at the twisted deviance of this relationship” and then turn it around into “but how are you looking at it” is good. god how good would it be if they also did that to eddie more. anyway.

a few years later you get the first MAJOR fucking backlash, culminating in the SECOND story titled the hunger. spectacular spider-man: the hunger, from 2003. completely reboots venom and retcons their motivations and backstories, makes very spiteful references to planet of the symbiotes and the hunger, like it is not also called that by sheer coincidence. literally starts out, in a comic that wants to tackle and redefine venom, with the line “the PROBLEM is that you guys are like an old married couple”. so the new status quo is that the symbiote only ever used eddie to be with spider-man, and eddie only ever used the symbiote to not die of cancer.

the “control narrative” that really kicks in here uses the symbiote as, you know, a thing to control, eddie’s demons personified or even a completely foreign force to torment him. if eddie is evil, it’s not because of what he thinks and believes and wants, it’s because he couldn’t control the symbiote and gave in to its inexplicable bloodlust.

this is an unambiguous downgrade in terms of complexity, in my humble opinion, completely fucks up eddie’s responsibility themes, and is also a pretty clearly petty reaction to venom’s absolute oversaturation in the nineties. the bitch was everywhere and most of it wasn’t good. so there was LOTS of “look at this creepy loser” content by writers cringing themselves into self-awareness at the time. the 00s were going to be GRITTY and MATURE.

this of course means that we get to see eddie slit his wrists and bleed to death on panel after selling the symbiote to supervillains as an attempted act of redemption???

wild fucking times! it’s not exactly worth recommending as ~shippy~, but the first real backbacklash to this first round of retcons comes from dan slott, who just kind of ignores it all in new ways to die. drags eddie back to the land of the living and relevant, makes the symbiote refuse to let its new host kill him, telling that host, and reestablishing, that it loves eddie. and then, to keep him living and relevant, slott makes eddie anti-venom.

don’t even worry about it. anti-venom is essentially eddie seeking redemption with symbiote powers, but without the symbiote, except he pretty much acts no fucking different at all, just keeps on being a murderous vigilante with cracked ideas about innocence and guilt. people still act like he’s better now because, in its metatextual ways, the hunger was right.

then fucking uuuuuuhhhhhhh. agent venom. symbiote goes to flash thompson and the us military, and the writer, rick remender, goes really, really, really hard on the control narrative. the symbiote becomes a substance flash is addicted to, gives a voice to his past abuse, it’s dark times all the times.

people very much do like that narrative for flash, like at least from that perspective it was worth it. i don’t like it much for the symbiote. for the symbiote, representing everything fucked up with flash and forcing him to murder kill bite all the time is resolved via the good guy avengers literally lobotomising it so flash can wear it without further resistance or input. imagine doing that to a human person. you’re uncooperative so we’re gonna turn off your higher cognitive functions and wear you like a meat suit. happy ending for everybody! truly we’ve conquered our demons this day.

then! at the same time, there’s a cartoon coming out, it’s called ultimate spider-man. THAT one does the control narrative take with harry osborn, but then does the relationship take with flash, making it the only cartoon to outright redeem the symbiote and let it find friendship and be valued as a person.

and people loved it! so brian michael bendis gets it in his head that he’s going to redeem the symbiote and make it partner up with flash. and he does redeem it by the highly fucking questionable means of having it be “cleansed”, aka brainwashed and relieved of its memories and personality. not that it matters for long. nothing fucking matters in comics. take this with you if it’s the only thing.

so then for fun friendship times you get venom: space knight, flash and the symbiote’s adventures in space! and then that gets cancelled. eddie is off somewhere being toxin and hunting carnage (2016). many good comics but you did not ask for them.

and THEN.

it is time for the next MOTHER of backlashes.

flash gets literally discarded at fucking roadside to put the symbiote back on eddie and turn back time on their relationship to RIGHT before the FIRST backlash happened. you know, all those 2003 retcons. gone. ignored. no more. venom’s themes are now those circa 1996 again. full fucking on relationship narrative. ROMANTIC relationship narrative, and that after the symbiote was turned into eddie’s evil shadow, after he hated it and spent a LONG time seeking to eradicate all symbiotes (and not even for the first time).

the COSTA run. venom (2016). reviled and beloved.

like this comic is fucking ANGRY about symbiote treatment. i HAD to tell you all of that so you’d understand ANYTHING it’s doing. the first thing it does is flip it completely around, puts the symbiote on a military guy who’s making IT do bad things, makes his ability to control it horrifying and abusive instead of heroic and admirable. one of the later things it does (in the follow-up venom: first host) is outright feature a villain who lobotomises symbiotes, ending on a symbiote serving him swift and sweet payback by doing the same thing TO HIM. it’s exactly as unsubtle as the hunger (2003) was about its hang-ups.

comics... are a conversation.

flash remains a symbiote friend but still got fucked over big time by it all, symbiote-focused writers slott and costa also kind of use him to literally, in case anybody hadn’t caught on, literally spell out the REAL story that’s been going on in the writer's room for the past THIRTY YEARS:

you’ll notice i didn’t actually list any of the Gay Shit for you, you’ve probably already seen it or you’ll get to see it for yourself. yes, they are deeply in love, yes, it’s fucked up and flawed, yes, it is real and taken seriously and has ultimately redeeming potential. yes the concept of that nearly knocked me off my feet and in front of the subway at one point. yes there’s mpreg

it’s also fucking riddled with events, which spin off into other comics, so either ignore those and rely on the recaps OR click yourself forward through the “next issue (story)” button on marvel wikia to know what to read.

and after that must of course come the backbackbacklash, as certain as death or taxes. in the next run, we retcon everything once more, eddie just needs to control his darkness, the symbiote was an evil abuser all along, nothing on earth is ever new.

i’m not gonna go through it, i’m just gonna point you to the backbackbackbacklash issue that came out during this time: venom annual volume 2 number 1 - it’s confusingly named, it’s the one that has a blue-skinned space lady on it. this one ignores the backbackbacklash going on very pointedly and goes “it’s not ABOUT control” again, it’s pretty explicitly romantic.

and then there’s also marvel comics presents (2019) #5, which, oddly enough, does not particularly feature the characterisation you’d typically see in the relationship narrative? but it does feature eddie and the symbiote literally fucking, so you’d want to know about it.

that’s the overall, like, frame of eddie and the symbiote being in a relationship (nuh uh) (yeah they are) (NUH UH) (YEAH THEY ARE)

some stuff that’s smaller but still notable, uh.

nova (1999) 6 - 7, that’s the “we’re space married”

venom: dark origin, that’s an ALTERNATE (!!!) take on the character, don’t expect a likeable eddie but it’s very darkly funny and gay so what can i say.

venom: the end, which i would absolutely fucking hate to be canon, i think its characterisation is quite regressive, but the symbiote sure is in love, i guess.

venom: separation anxiety, the dawn of the control narrative but eddie’s characterisation did not have to go so wrong from here, like if they’d just figured out AT THIS STAGE that he's STILL acting like venom without it... i digress. it has the symbiote going eddie eddie eddieee

venom: sinner takes all, this is the first she-venom comic so that’s. hm. interesting. healing symbiote blanket

don’t read venom: license to kill just look at this panel with me

if i think of more comics worth adding i’ll add them.

the subtext slash text is heavy enough to be present to some degree in literally every cartoon adaptation of eddie brock. spider-man: the animated series goes FULL control narrative, in fact it started the “the symbiote corrupted peter” take that we to this day cannot escape, but the first few venom episodes are VERY playful about their relationship.

in spectacular spider-man it’s canon, but horrible. eddie’s in love with it, but eddie's a good boy and the symbiote is played very, very, very abusively. i think this is an evil symbiote adaptation that works well enough, at least it’s an actual meaningful character instead of just a malevolent force to resist.

in marvel’s spider-man, the only venom episode worth watching is venom returns.

i’ve actually got every symbiote-relevant episode listed right here from when we did our communal watch-through.

also watch truth in journalism. idk if it’s exactly shippy just do it

#venom #symbrock #tl;dr i wish i could tl;dr this #no off-site links to please the gods of tagging

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traincat · 4 years ago

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Disregard my last ask because the latest issue raised a troubling question that I, as a black man, feel the need to clarify with you, a woman. That whole whole Ned Leeds/Betty Brant business is sexual assault via deception right? Like you know more about Clones and Spider-Man 616 than I but I feel like that’s besides the point because it happened to Betty. She is carrying the child of whom she thought was her dead ex-husband. And Ned clone has to know he is a clone. He has to know. Unlike Ben and Kaine, he has the awareness and information of the Jackal and the awareness of his progenitor’s death.

Or am I reaching too far and reading too far into things?

I'm glad you came back and asked this specific question because it's definitely something I have a lot of thoughts on, and I’m glad you asked my thoughts on it as a woman because I think this is one of those comic book storylines that’s hard for me to divorce that fact from -- the fact that I’m a woman definitely plays into how I view this storyline specifically and how it effects me, in ways I don’t think were necessarily intended by some of the writers involved in its ongoing arc who were not looking at things from the same perspective I’m coming at them from. I definitely don't think you're reaching or reading too far into things -- I think that is what's being presented on the page, albeit likely without authorial intent. Just as like a general disclaimer, I'm not closely following Spencer's run for the sheer reason that I'm not enjoying it very much, although I'm aware of the general directions it's taking through friends and social media. But I actually think this Betty/Ned issue goes back pretty far.

First things first, I think Clone Conspiracy really wreaked havoc on how Spider-Man as a series has always handled clones. Pre-Clone Conspiracy, there was a very clear clone narrative going on: clones are their own person, they are not direct copies or replacements of the original. You see this with Ben Reilly and you see it with the Gwen Stacy clones. Clones are treated as their own individuals, even if they have to struggle to get to that point -- there's even an issue of Spider-Man Unlimited where Ben and Betty go on a date. Betty doesn't know that Ben is Peter's clone -- he's introduced as his cousin -- and they both reflect on how you can't go back to the way things were. So even though Ben has all of Peter's memories regarding his initial romance with Betty, the narrative makes it clear that Ben and Betty cannot recapture that connection or that exact relationship.

Here's where Clone Conspiracy changed everything, in my opinion for the worse: Clone Conspiracy's clone narrative is that these clones are, essentially, the original person. I believe the Marvel wiki still actually lists the end of Clone Conspiracy as 616 Gwen Stacy's issue of death instead of Amazing Spider-Man #121, because Clone Conspiracy treated that Gwen not simply as a clone with all of the same memories, but as essentially Gwen resurrected through a cloning process. The Billy Connors who was cloned is treated as the same Billy Connors who was killed by his father in Shed (Amazing Spider-Man #630-633). And the clone Ned is treated as the same as 616 Ned. This is a mess, to put it simply, because it goes against all the previous Spider-Man cloning narratives and, honestly, most popular sci-fi clone narratives, and it's seriously undermining decades of good Spider-Man storytelling in ways that Slott didn't address and that Spencer seems unwilling to. It probably wouldn't have been a very big deal -- a frustrating one, but not a big one -- if all of the clones had perished at the end of Clone Conspiracy, but they didn't. Billy Connors escaped, and it's immensely frustrating to me to see Peter treating the Connors family reunion as something he can tolerate when Curt Connors ate his kid, and the Ned clone slithered away in the gutters to, I assume, spite me personally.

Which brings us to the current Betty Brant storyline in Amazing Spider-Man, where Betty has showed up heavily pregnant and informed Peter that the child is Ned's.

Yeah, I would say this is in fact the worst possible part. (ASM (2018) #67) Just speaking for myself, I'm generally not anti-pregnancy or baby storylines in comics, but this one is making me very uncomfortable for reasons beside Spencer being apparently unable to find any way to fit Betty into his stories without her showing pregnant.

So I'm actually going to take this back way, way to when Betty and Ned first got married, with some explanation of who Ned Leeds is for the uninformed, because, especially with the MCU's Ned Leeds in the mix, he's not exactly the world's most well known Spider-Man character. (I’m sure @ubernegro, who is much more well read on Miles Morales’ canon than I am, has thoughts on how the MCU’s Ned borrowed heavily off the character of Ganke Lee with a 616 Peter Parker character’s name pasted over him.) Ned was initially introduced as Peter's competition for Betty's affections -- Ned was older than both Peter and Betty, a working reporter, and presented as the more "stable" option compared to Peter, who of course Betty vastly preferred before circumstances tore them apart. Ned and Betty married in Amazing Spider-Man #156 and jetsetted off to Europe for Ned's job. This is where the cracks in the marriage began. Betty later reveals that she felt abandoned by Ned in Europe, to the point where she was able to come back to New York without his immediate notice -- as a woman, it's very easy to read their relationship at this point as being one filled with, if not abuse, then emotional neglect. Betty and Peter have a quick extramarital affair at this point -- Peter has just broken up with Mary Jane and Betty claims she and Ned are separating -- that persists until Ned returns and punches Peter over it.

(ASM #193)

(ASM #229) Betty and Ned reconcile off panel shortly thereafter, but that's pretty far from the end of the story. It's implied that the problems Betty and Ned previously had start to develop again, namely that Betty feels abandoned by Ned, that he is inattentive and, again, as a woman, it's hard not to read it as emotional neglect, if not abuse -- yet. Betty does start another affair at this point, this time with Flash Thompson, and Ned starts acting strangely. It would later be retconned that he was suffering the effects of hypnotism by the Hobgoblin, but like I said, that's a retcon, and what was happening at the time was that Ned was acting erratically in part because he was the villainous Hobgoblin. Ned becomes controlling, threatening, and verbally and physically abusive towards Betty.

(ASM #284)

(ASM #283) "I suppose you think it's all right for a wife to cheat on her husband!" "No -- but I won't let you hurt her, either." Leaving aside that Peter also had an affair with Betty, something he's conveniently forgetting in the above panels, I've always really liked this exchange, because the narrative makes it clear through Peter's response to Ned that, whatever the audience may think of Betty for cheating on Ned, it is reprehensible for Ned to publicly humiliate her and/or physically abuse her as a response.

Then Ned Leeds dies in Spider-Man vs Wolverine and he's revealed as the Hobgoblin posthumously shortly thereafter and that remains canon for years and years until it's later retconned out, as comics are wont to do. But that's not really that important for this conversation -- my point being, at one point in Spider-Man canon, it's made fairly clear to the reader that Ned is an abusive husband. He emotionally neglected and abused Betty several times over and physically hurt her at least once on panel, with the clear intent that the reader should realize that he is physically hurting her. So for me as a reader and as a woman, this has always been a really uncomfortable relationship. I have a problem with later Spider-Man comics claiming that it's "not Ned's fault" that he abused Betty because of the retcon that he was hypnotized, and I have a problem with the MCU making Betty and Ned into a cute summer fling in Spider-Man: Far From Home, because I feel like Ned's clear abuse of Betty either gets excused or entirely glossed over. And I don’t think the initial abuse storyline is bad -- I think there’s some amount of value in portraying Betty as a woman who marries too young, who experiences a terrible marriage, and who then spends years recovering from that marriage, which was the case up until they retconned Ned’s abuse of her as a side effect of him being controlled by the real Hobgoblin. What I’m specifically uncomfortable with is the post-retcon attitude that since Ned didn’t really mean to abuse Betty, it’s perfectly fine to portray the relationship in a positive light when even before Ned’s abuse became physical that wasn’t the case. I think that’s ultimately really irresponsible storytelling. As a reader, I’m not against soap opera style storylines -- someone getting impregnated by a cone of their ex-husband seems pretty par for the course. But there’s so much additional context here that I still haven’t entirely processed how I feel about this Betty storyline, except that what I feel isn’t positive.

So yes, I would agree with you when I say I think there’s quite a lot of deception involved in Betty’s pregnancy storyline -- the Ned clone didn’t tell her he was a clone, even though he had full knowledge of that fact, just as he had full knowledge of how badly the original Ned treated Betty over the course of their relationship -- that renders their sexual encounter and Betty’s pregnancy uncomfortable for me as a reader, to put it mildly. I don’t think it’s out of character for the Ned clone, given that he acts much like the original Ned: he’s selfish and controlling, withholding information from Betty to suit his own needs. The tragedy of Ned and Betty isn’t that Ned died, as more recent Spider-Man stories like to portray it -- including this one, where Betty doesn’t have the knowledge that a) the Ned she reunited with was a clone and not the original and b) that that clone later died. (ASM #816.) The tragedy is that writers continue to force Betty Brant into Ned Leeds storylines instead of letting her as a character grow past him, and that the only way Spencer thought to include her, one of the longest running Spider-Man characters, back in the story was to have her appear starry-eyed over carrying the child of (the clone of) her abusive ex-husband, and the tragedy is that nobody writing more recent Betty and Ned interactions seems to realize that Ned was a villain not because he was briefly the Hobgoblin but because of how he treated Betty.

#betty brant #ned leeds #marvel comics #long post/#wednesday spoilers #traincat talks comics #*replies

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purplepenntapus · 4 years ago

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Rating Versions of Harry Osborn: Updated

Wanted to redo this post with a more comprehensive and inclusive list of Harrys

616 Comics:

Just such a good and complex character. The OG Harry. His relationship with Peter just adds so much depth to every Green Goblin arc because of the inherent conflict of Peter knowing he needs to take down Norman Osborn, but not wanting to hurt or lose his best friend. (If you’ve read Kindred no you haven’t.) He’s still... ugly... I’m sorry 616 Harry... I love you so much but they did you dirty... Some artists do their best with what they have but... I’m not a big fan of western comic style in general so that doesn’t help. Has three failed marriages by the time he’s 30 because he’s gay and deeply closeted. 8/10

Spider-Man the Animated Series (1994):

The Harry plotline in this show reeeeally doesn’t feel earned, because the first time we see Harry having an active role in the show, he asks Peter to move in with him because Norman wants him to have a responsible studious roommate (a detail from the comics I was EXTREMELY excited to see play out), and Peter comments that they barely know each other. Ultimately they live together for all of one day before Peter decides to move back in with Aunt May. The next time we see Harry, MJ calls him Peter’s best friend, despite the fact that we haven’t seen Peter hanging out with—or even MENTIONING—Harry since the last episode when they were basically strangers. Really it feels like he’s just there to cause romantic drama as the guy MJ graciously settles for when she gives up on Peter. I found the whole goblin plotline kind of boring and lacking in depth. 3/10

Raimi Trilogy:

I was never interested in Raimi Harry until after I started liking and exploring other versions of Harry, because I just thought he was kinda a shit friend. He’s a pretty strong character overall, but his motivations aren’t as obvious. He’s torn between his love of Peter as his best friend, and his bitterness towards Peter for being the man his father wished he was. I don’t think Raimi Harry really wanted MJ, he just wanted to get back at Peter in a way by taking someone that HE loved. However I feel like his characterization kind of sways back and forth between sympathetic and not depending on how he’s written in the scene, and it disappoints me that the thing that gets him to stop tormenting Peter is the butler telling him out of nowhere that Norman died from his own blade, rather than any real character development on his part. 6/10

Spectacular Spider-Man:

I still haven’t watched all of this show because I... can’t STAND this version of Peter... but I’ve watched many clips with this boy and he’s just... so sweet... He only wants to be loved and keeps getting his heart broken. Deserves better. On everything. He deserves a better father, a better best friend, better love interests, everything. I do really enjoy the way they incorporated 616 Harry’s drug abuse into this show with the Globulin Green, it was a very clever way to incorporate that aspect of his character, but tone it down for younger viewers. I’ve watched the scene of him getting “unmasked” as the Green Goblin about a million times it’s very good. 8/10

Ultimate Spider-Man:

I love him. Most people fear drifting apart from those close to us, so watching Harry struggle with the new and increasing distance between him and Peter as Peter seemingly makes new, “better” friends is downright heartbreaking. Especially when he overhears Sam implying that Peter only hangs out with him for his money which is something he’s clearly experienced a lot. (Seriously Sam what the fuck.) I also love his struggle with Venom throughout the series as a metaphor for his anger and bitterness, it’s never truly gone even when they work hard to remove it. It’s always there to bubble back up under extreme amounts of stress, especially when Norman is involved. (Also this isn’t a Norman review, but USM Norman is the only version of Norman Osborn that has rights and he works hard to be the father Harry deserves.) Had an honest to God meet-cute with Peter like come on???? Its unfortunate how much they cut back Harry’s role in the third and fourth season, I really would have loved to see more of him. Threw a party specifically so he could ignore Peter to his face because he was jealous and I respect that level of pettiness. 9/10

Spider-Man: The New Animated Series

I didn’t think it was possible to create an uglier Harry than 90s Harry but this blonde, fuck-boy lookin creepass came and proved me wrong. Who the FUCK is this?? Doesn’t have any recognizable characteristics of Harry Osborn besides being rich and hating Spider-Man. Also just... look at him. I wouldn’t trust this man anywhere NEAR my drink at a party. #NotMySon -3/10

The Amazing Spider-Man:

He’s okay. I think he has some very emotional scenes and good chemistry with Peter, but it’s dampened by the fact that he wasn’t present in the first film and had to share the second with like two other main plot lines. Ultimately ends up being the least sympathetic version of Harry Osborn because he became the original Green Goblin and killed Gwen, rather than following in his father’s footsteps. That’s not to say he’s a completely unsympathetic character. He has a strong motivator in his fear of death, and I do think the choice they made for his character were interesting and could have developed really well, but they didn’t get the chance since the franchise was dropped. 5/10

PS4 Spider-Man:

ABSOLUTELY ADORE HIM. WISH WE GOT MORE OF HIM. HAVING YOUR EXPECTATIONS OF HARRY OSBORN BROKEN AS YOU SNEAK AROUND NORMAN’S PENTHOUSE AND LEARN THAT HE’S BEEN SECRETLY STRUGGLING WITH A GENETIC DISEASE HE’S BEEN HIDING FROM HIS BEST FRIENDS FOR YEARS WAS -chef’s kiss- GENIUS. PLEASE GIVE US A SECOND GAME WITH VENOM HARRY. 10/10

Marvel’s Spider-Man (2017):

Still easily my favorite version of Harry Osborn. When I first began watching the show I was startled by their decision to make Harry a science genius like Peter because it was so different from their usual dynamic, and many people who aren’t fans of the show point to this as something they dislike. But I actually ended up really loving the decision. It gives a different flavor to Harry in how he reacts to the events of the show and how we interpret his character traits, while still being very inherently Harry Osborn. Harry is jealous of Peter, he loves him dearly, but there’s always this ember of bitter envy ready to burst into anger whenever the plot creates friction between them. This is one of the defining traits of their relationship and in most versions it’s not hard to understand why. Peter has what Harry wants. He’s intelligent, he has potential, and most importantly he’s loved. Peter is the son Harry knows Norman wishes he had, and that creates a wedge between them. Marvel’s Spider-Man changes this dynamic. Harry can easily stand toe-to-toe with Peter in terms of intelligence, and in fact they often work together to create things or solutions Peter couldn’t have come up with on his own. That initial wedge between them isn’t there, creating a very endearing and loving friendship that we know is doomed to sour because it isn’t enough. MSM Harry could be the person Norman wants him to be, and that places the full weight of his father’s impossibly high expectations on his shoulders, always within reach but never quite achievable. So it makes a lot more sense why Peter initially has a low guard towards Norman (as opposed to some other series where Peter seems oddly dismissive of Harry’s justified complaints) and Harry’s own steadfast loyalty to his father. On the surface Norman seems like a perfectly loving parent, he encourages his son, he created an entire school for him when he was wrongfully accused of sabotage, it’s only when you start to dig deeper into their relationship that you see the subtle manipulations and the issues Harry has from constantly chasing his father’s approval. This creates a Harry who is desperate for validation and extremely sensitive to rejection, which colors his relationship with Peter throughout the show. I’m still mad he got nerfed in the second and third seasons because Disney is homophobic. TLDR: I may be biased ... Infinity/10

MCU:

Where is he? Who knows? Man missing in action. ?????/10

#Harry Osborn #spider-man #msm 2017 #did i rant about various Harry Osborns way longer than I intended to? Yes yes I did #if anyone reads this tell me if i missed any prominent Harrys lmao #long post

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guessimabasicnerdgirlnow · 3 years ago

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I need to tell the whole story. It’s probably not that interesting to anyone but it’s always good for me to have this stuff saved on a blog

The story of how I acquired a new blorbo

It all started when I decided to rewatch Homecoming. I have been meaning to do so for a while because I couldn’t remember much of the movie, and mostly because I wanted to take a better look at the supporting cast. Back when I first watched it they didn’t mean much to me, but it’s apparently a side effect of becoming a Venom fan that I grew attached to some of Peter’s friends. I don’t even know them all that well I just love them. So I had to

But truth be told I have a bunch of movies I want to rewatch. Or watch for the first time. Look, when I watch things, I devote my whole mind to watching it. For the 2 or something hours of a movie’s length I will be entirely focused on it. It’s intense. I call it when I am watching a thing without being entirely focused “passive watching”, and I don’t passive watch something I want to watch. That is for telenovelas and whatever whichever family member has the remote control decides to watch when I am hanging in the living room. My stuff, I always actively watch. But actively watching is tiring so I can’t just do it any time. It’s an Event. It needs to be planned.

So, in short, I have this long ass list of things I want to watch and rewatch that I never get to. It’s why I prefer reading. In any format.

(I am very autistic, yes, in case I haven’t mentioned it)

But one fine night I had a dream. I don’t remember exactly what it was like but something in it made me decide “today I will rewatch Spider-Man Homecoming”. And I woke up with this thought. It’s not a thing that happen often, I think the mouse is using dark magic or something to advertise in my dreams. But I decided that day’s adventure would be it.

So there I went to the mouse’s streaming land and found out they don’t have it??? Apparently all Spider-Man’s movies are scattered across the services and there’s no logic but whatever. I did find it and I did rewatch it and I did catch some easter eggs and it was fun. But while in the mouse’s streaming land I took a look at what they had there and that’s where it all went downhill.

I have said before I play a bunch of phone games to satisfy the “gotta catch them all” instinct, right? They haven’t made a slime only of those, unfortunately, and Spider-Man Unlimited is dead rip. So while hunting my beloved slimes in them, I run across all these characters, some which I know or have heard of, some which I don’t. And there are some short bios, and sometimes I have to use them, and the card game has all those cool illustrations…

That was probably their plan all along.

I am not immune to hot characters with cool aesthetics and I’m at a point of my life that I seem to crave all the power fantasies (that’s part of why I ended up here after all) so

I may or may not have already had a vague crush on Black Bolt when I saw that the Inhumans show was in there and then I found out it had only 8 episodes which seemed manageable to actively watch…

It’s all Ultimate Spider-Man (cartoon)’s fault, really. All those crossover episodes bore me, so I could use the distraction from it.

I also can blame the postponing of the recent comics, you know. A long time ago when I followed ongoing manga I was used to living off of 20 pages a month or something, but I don’t remember how to do it. And some fics I followed ended recently, and I am having another writer’s block, and…

So here I am.

That’s the story, that’s the context. The actual post, what I wanted to share comes next.

So, uhm, I find googling stuff related to an hyperfixation embarrassing. So while I already learned that if I wanted to get into some new comic I should look for a curated list, from someone with similar interests to mine, I was not about to google it, so I counted on marvel complete reading order, aka the one that helped me get here (and half accidentally skip a bunch of stuff because I did not realize that Venom’s page referred specifically to Eddie and not the symbiote with anyone else, sorry Mac), even though I also already learned that it includes some useless cameos and other uninteresting stuff. But it feels less “judgemental” than google and its habit of trying to guess what I will type, and it conveniently links to the marvel reading app, so yeah.

Well, at least I thought so. Sometimes with older comics it doesn’t have a link, and I guessed that meant the app didn’t have them. Thank god for pinterest’s (usually dumb) algorithm to have picked up this new hyperfixation and giving me spoilers so that I realized I seemed to skip an event very relevant to my interests. And also for pirating sites, my beloved, for having the issues that the app lacked. Because the most interesting stuff so far was on these issues with no link! I feel so betrayed by everyone!

(And now I am wondering if I make a new blog or put this stuff here too. When I made this blog, I planned to dump any comic related stuff here, but I actually don’t like mixing stuff. But does it count as mixing when the stuff is in the same universe? Damn it)

Anyway. The reading order site pointed me to one issue of Planet of the Symbiotes. Because, as I said, it counts useless cameos, I try my best to filter those out when I can figure them out. I should probably reread pots anyway, it’s a five stars. But this time, it just pointed me to it for this panel:

which I loved because every time someone says “sonics” I inevitably think that my boy would be a nightmare for the slimes. Then again, his sonic powers can probably kill everyone, slime or not. Ah, those power fantasies…

#shut up brock #personal

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thevindicativevordan · 3 years ago

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What do you think of Ultimatum and the Ultimate Universe post-that in detail?

Conceptually the Ultimate Universe makes a lot of sense and I wish DC had gone that route with the New 52.

Newcomers are constantly asking how they can possibly get into comics when the continuity is so byzantine that you need a walkthrough on where to start. Marvel had a great solution: why not just sidestep the main universe and create a new one? That way you don't alienate your current fanbase by rebooting, and some of your mainline readers might still be interested enough to check out an alternate version of their favorite characters alongside the new blood. Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man set the tone for the entire initiative, the runaway success of USM turning what was supposed to just be a retelling of Spider-Man's origin in the present day into a full fledged universe. Ultimate versions of the F4, the X-Men, and the Avengers - called the Ultimates because Marvel had no faith in the Avengers brand name as crazy as that seems now - soon followed. Mandate was simple: update Marvel's premiere franchises for a modern day audience. Way the writers fulfilled that directive was to make everyone huge assholes (apart from Spider-Man who was mostly the same as his 616 counterpart) in an attempt to be more "realistic".

Realism was the buzz word that the Ultimate Universe revolved around. No secret identities, the heroes killed much more freely, the government either outright conscripted or kept close watch over all the heroes, and the more fantastical side of the 616 universe was either revamped or not present here. Dead meant dead in the UU, barring a few cheats. All superheroes were tied in various ways to attempts at recreating the Super Soldier Serum that gave Captain America his powers. Would you believe that the UU was so successful at it's peak people actually thought there was a chance Marvel might scrap 616 and make the UU the mainline Marvel Universe? Bendis on USM and Millar on the Ultimates outsold their 616 counterparts pretty handily as I recall. Less successful were the Ultimate F4 and Ultimate X-Men franchises which never enjoyed the same esteem by my recollection. Nonetheless Marvel had successfully created an alternate universe that brought in new readers, revamped aging franchises with fresh ideas, and revitalized sales.

Then came Ultimatum.

Ok much as it pains me to say, I get why they did this. Over time the UU had accumulated so much continuity it became incapable of fulfilling it's original goal of being the MU that you didn't need to read a bunch of back issues to get into. They needed to rebrand the purpose of the Ultimate line. Asking the question "what can the Ultimate Universe be if it can't be the easy gateway into comics anymore?", prompted Ultimatum as an answer: it can be the MU that radically changes. Take a look at the list of those killed. Would anyone really give a damn if any of the big names on that list died in a 616 event? Answer for anyone with any experience with Big 2 comics is no. A-Listers who die always come back eventually, just takes a while. Used to be a joke that "nobody stays dead in comics except Jason Todd, Bucky, and Uncle Ben". I'm sure that joke is still funny for modern readers, albeit for totally different reasons now. Ultimatum killed major players off and completely changed the status quo of the UU for good. It's a story with real stakes, a story that mattered all the way up until the UU got shuttered.

Too bad it fucking sucked.

Jarring continuity errors, terrible pacing, cartoonishly edgy even for the UU, unsatisfying and abrupt deaths, and idiotic retcons made Ultimatum widely reviled as it was coming out. It's a terrible story that basically killed the Ultimate Universe. Afterwards the UU never returned to the level of acclaim and interest it enjoyed in it's prime. The Ultimate F4 and Ultimate X-Men franchises were more or less dead after this event, with Ultimate Reed becoming evil in one of the few positively received post Ultimatum events, and the X-Men just limping along. One rumor that I've heard but am unable to confirm is that Peter was supposed to die for real here, but Bendis basically threatened to leave Marvel if they didn't let him kill Peter on his own terms.

When Ultimate Peter was killed in the acclaimed Death of Spider-Man that was the death blow for the Ultimate Universe too. Miles brought some interest back by becoming the first black Spider-Man, but he was never Peter's equal in terms of sales. Hickman managed to spark some excitement again with his amazing Ultimates relaunch that billed itself as taking full advantage of the freedom the UU offered and featured Ultimate Reed aka The Maker as the new linewide bad guy. DC dropped the New 52 around the same time and that smothered Hickman's ambitions in the crib, Marvel yanked him over to the 616 Avengers titles to retool them into competition for Johns blockbuster Justice League relaunch. When Hickman left there was only a rapidly accelerating decline for the Ultimate titles. Bendis meandered around with Miles, clearly struggling with what to do now that he could no longer simply retell 616 ASM storylines. Humphries wrapped up Hickman's plots as quickly as he could, in a manner that most found unsatisfactory and caused another exodus. Another brief Ultimates relaunch, that marketed itself as a progressive team with no white guys and Miles at the center, was a huge flop due to being widely critically panned and terrible. There was a brief Ultimate FF relaunch by Fialkov that had quite possibly the worst art I have ever seen on a Big 2 book. Eventually Secret Wars mercy-killed the UU and aside from Miles and the Maker, no other characters were deemed worthy of being moved over to 616.

Biggest impact and legacy of the Ultimate Universe is the MCU. Whedon was a huge fan of the line and used Millar's Ultimates as the basis for the Avengers movies. The early MCU - especially RDJ's Iron Man and Holland's Spider-Man - owes an enormous debt to the UU's portrayal of the characters. The MCU picked from the best of 616 and the UU stories to craft it's own takes, and the movies would have been radically different without the UU's existence. Ultimate Spider-Man is what convinced the world that Peter Parker's ideal status quo is being a teenager in high school, and unfortunately likely encouraged Quesada's desire to erase the 616 Spider-Marriage. Like everything else there was a lot of good and a lot of bad, with the good being moved over to 616 or adapted into the MCU, and the bad buried with the universe itself.

There's rumblings that the UU will come back in some way, I know Donny Cates has set up the Maker returning there, but regardless of whether it does return or not I think the concept has outlived all possible use at this point. Maybe they should just make a new alternate universe instead?

#marvel comics #ultimate universe #ultimate marvel

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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Static Shock: Shock to the System and Aftershock Review

“You know what? 13 years ago, me and some friends sat in a restaurant all night and daydreamed about the kinds of stories we would tell if we had the chance. We wanted to expand the concept of superhero to include characters that kind of looked like us, who had some of the same background, experiences and dreams as we did. We wanted to create something fun that a new generation would respond to the same way we responded to our childhood heroes -and damn if we didn't succeed beyond my wildest dreams. Today, Static Shock is a household name with millions of fans of all ages (Is there stuff I'd do differently? Yeah, almost all of season four but why nitpick?) Static is the most successful thing I've ever helped create and I'm both proud and gratified that people have taken it into their hearts. “

Dwayne McDuffie, Co-Creator of Static and Writer for Static Shock

This review is dedicated to Dwayne McDuffie and Robert L. Washington III. Rest In Power Static Shock is awesome. I grew up with the show watching it both first run on the WB and second run on Cartoon Network and loved it as much as I did other large parts of my childhood courtsey of DC like Batman the Animated Series, Teen Titans and both Justice League Shows. What makes this unique among the DC Properties is that Static wasn’t really a big name when he got a show. He wasn’t even part of the DC Universe.

See as I had no idea for probably a good decade, Static actually came from Milestone Comics, a company ran by and focused on african americans. The goal was understandable: While black heroes existed at the time, and there were some fantastic ones like Storm, Jim Rhodes and Steel... these guys weren’t the center of their universes. The big faces of the big companies, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk, Iron Man, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash.. were white. So milestone was a shakeup of that with the main teams and heroes all being black, from Icon, an alien who’d lived among man but rather than end up in kansas like say superman ended up imprinting on a slave woman centuries ago and has been with us since, who was encouraged by an energetic teenager named Rocket to put on a costume and do something with his powers and his community, Hardware, a tech genius who had his work stolen by a white asshole and wanted to fight back and BLood Syndicate, a group of gang members all caught in the “The Big Bang”, a huge fight between all of Dakota, the midwest city where the comics take place, that ended when the police released a bunch of experimental gas that gave them all super powers.

As most of you who have watched the show already know, this is where Static comes from. Static was the company making their own Spider-Man, i.e. a nerdy teenager who suddenly gets super powers, in this case Virgil Hawkins who at the prodding of a friend took a gun to The Big Bang to get revenge on a bully. .but ultimately couldn’t go through with it, decided it wasn’t him and got rid of the gun and ran.. and still ended up in it, becoming Static, a young hero dedicated to using his powers to fight other “Bang Babies”.. a term that dosen’t really sound that great and they really should’ve thought through. But Phrasing aside the character was great and I look forward to reading more and only haven’t because I have to buy the issues gradually, but DC is currently re-releasing the individual issues of Static, Icon, and Hardware weekly in anticipation of a reboot of Milestone Coming in May digitally on Comixology at only 2 bucks a pop, and rereleased the original print collections that were long out of print for 10 bucks each, though i’m getting static on it’s own since i’ts really not that much less expensive as it only collects four issues while Icon and Hardware both collect 8, so I can wait a bit there on Hardware and already own Icon: A Hero’s Welcome.. and really need to review it at some point.

While Milestone’s output was good, at least from the two books i’ve read, with Robert Washinton III, who sadly not only ahs also passed but was fucking homeless for a while in the 2000′s.. what the actual hell, writing Static alongside Dwayne McDuffie, whose later moved onto animation writing tons of Static episodes all of them classics including the school shooting episode, the first three rubberbandman episodes and both Anasazi episodes. Point is it had good writers and artists and even had a distrbution deal with DC, so they had a leg up on the glut of other comic book companies.. but happened to start at the start of the comic book crash, a huge downturn in sales in the 90′s as the speculator boom, i.e. a bunch of people assuming every number one would be worth golden and silver age money, forgetting a character has to BUILD INTREST and this stuff takes time, and whose attempts to sell fast flooded the market with comics no one wanted,, caused the roof to cave in and with a bunch of assholes pegging milestone as a “Company for black people” rather than you know, a company trying to add fucking diversity and represntation to the comics industry, and that simply wanted a unvierse that was centered around people of color instead of white guys. The company eventually had to shut down, and was left to lisencing. This is where the show comes in. Producers HAD been trying to make shows based on Milestone for a while, as far back as the mid-90s and the company was was all for it but the closest it got was an x-men style team series using various characters whose first draft was terrible and whose second draft by Alan Burnett, a producer on various DC Animated shows who’d go on to produce Static Shock, that McDuffie and others really liked but sadly did not get picked up. eventually though with presistance Static ended up getting a series and as I said McDuffie went on to write for it though he did not develop it. Some changes went into place naturally to make it work for an early 2000′s kids show and while i’ll probably miss so since again, only read one issue as we go. But due to Milestone coming back my intrest was peaking, hence finally reading the copy of Icon I had to buy from the library years ago due to keeping it overdue but am now EXTREMLEY glad I own as i’ts incredibly rare and really damn good, and wanting to read static, doing so lately since it’s finally on digtiial and again not too expensive. So join me as I give you a shock to the system and revisit this hell of a series to see if it holds up.. which just to cut that short it does and i’m only holding off binging MORE because I want the first two eps to be fresh enough in my head to review properly.. and also go over the various voice actors because that’s a thing with me now and charcter co-creator dwayne mcduffie because he’s awesome.

As I like to do when covering a series first episodes, let’s run down the voice cast.

First up is an UTTER LEGEND, and I use the term voice acting legend a lot, and mean it every time and have good reason to use it when I say it, and Phil LaMarr is a GOD in the buisness, having done a metric ton of voice acting roles, and being easily the most proflific black voice actor in animation. He’s also done some acting work, mostly in pulp fiction which I have not seen, but his true staying power and talent is in animation so here’s just the roles I feel are most notable or may not be very notable but i’m bringing up anyway because it’s my list.

His roles besides Virgil include Lester Payton the Texas Ranger who showed up for one very good episode of king of the hill to be badass and show up the hickish, stupid and very punchable local Sheriff, Gearld’s obnoxious older brother Jamie O on Hey Arnold, Hermes Conrad from futurama, Carver from the Weekenders (PUT IT ON PLUS DISNEY), Axel Foley for exactly one bit in Clerks the Animated Series, but anyone whose seen it will know exactly which one, Micheal on the Proud Family, Black Vulcan on Harvey Birdman (In His Pants), Hector Con Carne and Dracula on Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Evil Con Carne, Jack on Samurai Jack something I didn’t know for decades (and I didn’t know about the carver thing till today though i’ts obvious in hindsight), John Motherfucking Stewart on Justice League and later Steel and Adult Static in the Unlimited seasons, Osmosis Jones on Ozzy and Drix, Bolbi Strogofski on Jimmy Neutron (And yes i’m just as shocked as you are.), Wilt on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Marcus on Life and Times of Juniper Lee, Bull Sharkowski on My Gym Partner is A Monkey and Also a Sociopath Please Help God My Life is a waking nightmare..... okay the rest of that title is implied but we all watched the same show, we all know in our hearts that was the title

Moving on, he was also, and yes there’s MORE: Maxie Zeus on The Batman, Philly Phil on Class of 3000, Both Robertsons AND Fancy Dan on the Spectacular Spider-Man, Jazz on Transformers Animated, Kit Fisto and Bail Organa on Star Wars the Clone Wars, Gambit and Bolivar Trask on Wolverine and the X-Men, Aquaman I, L-Ron and Green Beetle on Young Justice, J.A.R.V.I.S. and Wonder Man (Simon Williams) In Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Gabe and Carny on Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters (Really miss that game and have been snapping up what cards I can get lately), Baxter Stockman in the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (And there’s also an awesome photo of him with 2003 Baxter... the two best together in one place. I got chills), Dormammu (I’ve come to bargin) in various Marvel Shows, Noville in Mighty Magiswords, Zach’s dad Marcus in Milo Muprhy’s Law, Craig’s Douchey Brother Benard on Craig of the Creek, showing he’s clearly come full circle, And Mr. Scully on the Casagrndes. And given It took about two paragraphs to cover all of this, yeah, I MEANT legend.

Next we have Kevin Micheal Richardson as Virgil’s Dad Robert, and it’s the first time since I started introducing Voice Actors on a show that i’ve overlapped. I already covered him during the second episode of legend of the three caballeros, but for the short version he’s also very acomplished, very damn good and I somehow missed he played the old blind guy in hey arnold> Needless to say the dude is awesome.

Virgil’s Sister Sharon is played by Michele Morgan who was in the rap group BWP and did some smaller roles outside of this the one exception being Juicy on the PJ’s, which I have not watched much of but REALLY do not like, though i’ll at least give it credit for being a decently long lasted black claymation sitcom at at time when there were, and hoenstly still aren’t, many black animated shows.

Back to long casting sheets, next up is Jason Marsden, who is one of my faviorites as i’ve realized recently as Ritchie. As I also found out only recently he started on the Sitcom Step By Step and while that show is .. ehhhhhhhhh, he is great in it because he’s great in everything. He also apparently has his own internet variety show which I have to watch now. His roles include Max Goof, ironically given I was just talking about that role a few days ago, Haku in the english dub of Spirted Away, Micheal, the kid being yelled at by a bunch of 80′s cartoons characters not to take drugs in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue!, Nermal in the DTV Garfield movies and The Garfield Show, Tino on the Weekenders (SERIOUSLY DISNEY), Snapper Carr on Justice League, Rikochet on Mucha Lucha! for the last season (Why I do not knkow and while I love the guy he was not the right choice), Felix on Kim Possible, Chase Young on Xiaolin Showdown (WHich I did not realize was him and now I do easily his best role and I REALLY should’ve), Red Star and Billy Numerous on Teen Titans, Speedy on Batman Brave and the Bold, Impulse/Kid Flash II on Young Justice, and Fingers on Kaijudo. He hasn’t done as much lately which is a shame but hopefully i’tll pick up again.

Next up is Hotstreak, Virgil’s brutal bully turned unhinted pyromancer played by DANIEL COOKSY, another actor i’m happy to talk about and another faviorite I haven’t seen much of lately. Daniel was an actor from childhood, playing Budnick on Salute Your Shorts, but he quickly gained a long and storied catalogue of VA Work: His first big roll was as Montana Max on Tiny Toon Adventures and if there is a god he’ll be back for the reboot, Stoop Kid on Hey Arnold, the incomprable Jack Spicer on Xiaolin Showdown, far and away his best role and part of why Chronicles sucked so bad was he was he didn’t get to reprise the role, The titular Dave the Barbarian, Django of the Dead on El Tigre (Had no idea), Kicks utterly insufferable big Brother Brad on Kick Buttowski and apparently he’s back at it again after laying low for a bit as he’s voicing Snag in Long Gone Gultch.. which I already really needed to watch but hot damn, I missed him. Sign me up.

Frieda, Virgil’s crush and close friend who in the comics was his main confidante and love intrest but here is eventually pushed aside, is voiced by Danica Mckeller whose work didn’t seem all that familiar.. until I found out she was Ms. Martian on Young Justice. Hello, Megan. Very talented and she did get a major role in a dc show eventually so good for her. Can’t wait for season 4.

So with our major players out of the way, let’s talk about Dwayne. McDuffie is an AWESOME man and my respect has grown for him more and more with time. A writer and editor at Marvel, McDuffie has a decent resume doing smaller but awesome books, which I got most of for free last year when Marvel was giving out free digital collections due to the lock down, like Damage Control, a sitcom set in the marvel universe about the company that picks up after superhero battles and the logistics and antics that insue and Dethlok, about a pacfist trapped inside a cyborg zombie. He was as mentioned one of Milestone’s founders, and wrote Icon, Hardware and co-wrote the first few issues of Static. He’d go on to a pretty stacked career in animation, writing on this show and Justice League before becoming story editor and show runner for Unlimited , even making a return to comics as a result writing the Marvel miniseries beyond and an arc of Fantastic Four in which Black Panther and Storm filled in for Reed and Sue while the two of them worked on their marriage after Reed did.. pretty much everything he did in Civil War. He also became head writer and show runner for Ben 10: Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, revamping the franchise a bit, and Alien Force, at least the first two seasons are awesome and I feel people overreacted on the changes. Ultimate Alien is okay, but has it’s problems but the finale was awesome and left the man’s legacy on a high note.. as he sadly passed in 2011 due to heart complications. He is truly missed and produced some utterly amazing stuff whlie he was alive. So on that melacholy note let’s see what happens when his creation hits the tv screen shall we?

Shock to the System:

This episode is written by Christopher Simmons, who is apparently a huge art designer guy.. but i’m not sure that’s the same chirsptoher simmons. Much more notable is the writer of the episode after this Stan Berkowitz, who was showrunner for season 1 and has done a LOT of DCAU work and is suprising talent, having written a lot of awesome Justice League episodes including Secret Society and The Royal Flush One. Point is we’re in first class hands. Before the episode itself I want to talk about the intro and how it’s unique among DCAU shows. Like most Western Animation the intros for DCAU shows didn’t change much over the seasons with the most I can see is JLU changing up the footage to preview the current episode and later adding Hawkgirl to the intro after her return to the team. I THINK superman the animated series changed some of it’s footage too, but I can’t confrim it and may of just been imagining it. As i’ve talked about on my blog it’s normally a pet peeve of mine, mostly because shows you know, change after season 1, characters get added some one shot characters used for the intro never return, and after a while it can feel dated especially in more recent shows where the status quo is not at all set in stone and things change quite a bit. But sometimes it can be good enough that either the dated elements don’t matter or general enough that you don’t need to change it and i’ts just that good.. and given Batman the Animated Series has both in spades, you can see why i’ts probably my golden standard for intros and after superman the animated series DC mostly followed suit. But being part of the teen superhero boom of the 2000′s Static is unique in that it splits the diffrence: It’s intro gets the character across perfectly like a good intro should starting with Virgil getting out of bed and running a comb across his head before showing off to his sister to bug her and literally running into his dad who hand shim his bag and smiles, silently showing off his family. He then runs to school and runs into some trouble.. and said trouble changes for each intro, with Rubberband Man for season 1, Kanga (Whose name I only know because I happened to run across it) for season 2 and your guess is as good as mine for seasons 3 and 4, though Hotstreak is a constant. They still save some money for seasons 1 and 2 by recycling some animation.. but that’s alright with mea s it was good animation, and the improtant thing is cycling out old villians for new ones, while Season 3 is the only out and out redo to show off Richie taking on the Gear identity, adding about 10 seconds of intro to let him show off. Seriously it’s an utterly great intro and like the other DCAU intros outside of superman, stuck in my brain.

The other change that’s ENTIRELY diffrent from the rest of htem is that the music changes each time. The first two have the same formula just with a difrent vocalist and backing track: a superhero theme but with some hip hop beat boxing over it. The first intro is fine enough, not specattcular but stilll god. The second song.. is eh. Not really great and feels like a marked downgrade from season 1 and just dosen’t blend an ocrehstiral superhero theme with the beatbox elements NEARLY as well. The third song though is my faviorite.. even if I HATED Little Romeo as a kid because I really did not like his nick show, it’s more a straight up rap song, but it has a faster beat that fits the intro better, and Romeo’s bragging fits Virgil’s character and penchant for Spidey quips perfectly. I also find it ironic that the theme that blends in with the dcau the most, the first season’s, is the one from BEFORE they decided to put it in the same universe. Still this season’s intro slaps, I just like the LIttle Romeo one a bit more. The opening scene is picture perfect. Some masked crooks looting a warehouse are loading some stolen TV’s into a van when suddenly the lights come on one by one above one of the crooks before his tv switches to various channels before going haywire. Cue our heroes’ entrance. Let’s tak ea good look at him

Static’s Costume is awesome. While I prefer the season 3 redesign, and clearly DC agrees as the redeisgn was used for both pre and post new-52 when they used him, and while he’s getting a fresh design for the reboot, said design takes a lot of cures from said outfit. As for how the outfit differs from the comics itself this is the design he had in the comics

It didn’t change much from the first issue, with the exception of his now iconic big puffy jacket which was added pretty early into the character’s history but I was unaware of that and just assumed he had the bodysuit the whole time. The more you know. But as you can see outside of the cool puffy jacket over a costume the two couldn’t be more diffrent. While the Dakotaverse outfit is more a standard superhero outfit, with some regular clothes touches on top the first cartoon outfit comes off more realistic, looking fantastic, but still coming off as something two teenagers could realistically have thrown together with what clothes they could buy, while still looking awesomely superheroy. IN short it’s perfect and only topped by the season 3 onward look...

But the slicker look, with an even cooler jakcet and the new colors all fitting the lighting ascetic better, but fits: not only has Virgil come along farther since he started, but with Richie now having a genius brain as Gear, he can provide a far slicker, far more professional superhero outfit on the budget the two have. This show is just great at costume design.

So getting back to the episode at hand, Static puts up a huge sign in elecrticy saying “Bad guys here”, PFFFT, and then hides away and narrates that a few days ago he’d be the last person anyone would’ve expected to be a hero. Cue Flashback.

We meet Virgil Hawkins on an average day: rapping into his razor, getting into a petty argument with his older sister Sharon, as a younger brother myself I relate to this, and talking to his dad who tries to get them to cut that out. We find out his mom has passed via his sister making really terrible eggs and saying that’s how mom made them. Exposition! Though we do get a great bit through this as when his sister gets distracted by her boyfriend calling, he uses the opportunity of her leaving the room to dump the eggs.. after having earlier jokingly prayed to his mom for a way out of breakfast. “Thanks for looking out for me mom” That’s both very sweet and very hilarious.

This is a change from the comics it turns out as I was utterly flored to find Virgil’s mom alive and well when reading the first issue of Static. Turns out this was a change made during development and one Dwane McDuffie admitted in the interview I got the tribute quote from to not liking as he had a good reason for having Virgil have a nuclear family, as most black families in media at the time were just one single parent and a kid or two with the other having either left or died. He wasn’t too bothered by it as while he preferred what he came up with in the first place, the show DID get some really good stories out of her being gone and didn’t just have her be absent because shut up. Virgil is still working over her death and the way HOW she died ends up playing an important role in this episode and gives Virgil a dislike of guns, as she died to gang violence. So the change wasn’t for stupid or racist reasons, but likely both to keep the character count down while giving them something to work with for storylines. Or it could’ve been for stupid reasons and the writers simpily made lemonade out of that very dumb lemon, either way it ended up working. Virgil also plans to ask his friend Frieda out. Frieda was a bigger deal in the comics, being Virgil’s friend and confidante as well as his ocasional love intrest, but here while she was inteded to at least be his love intrest here, that sorta fizzled out. As for the best friend role we meet her replacement in Richie, which McDuffie conceded was the kind of change a studio would make swapping out a female character for a male one. That being said the crew made the best of it and Richie is awesome, a bit of an overcompensating dipstick at times, but a good sounding board and pal for virgil and funny as hell too. He was also gay, something only revealed post series by McDuffie.. but unlike say Dumbledore, it’s a bit easier to swallow here: The early 2000′s were an even worse time for gay characters in tv let alone cartoons, and if they couldn’t kiss or have sex scenes on regular tv, there was no way we were getting any representation in a children’s show. So it was largely just hinted at by Richie overcompensating in how “into girls” he was and i’m once again fine with this being word of god as it was literally the best they could do and his counterpart in the comics was also gay, if not as relevant. Ritch encourages Virgil to work on his opening to ask her out as it’s awkward as heck, hits a bit close to home.. but I do appricate the show just .. having him try and ask her out from the first episode. They likely would’ve drug thigns out a bit granted had they used Frieda more, i’m not blind to the convetions of the time. .but as someone who got the very wrong idea from tv that just waiting around meant a girl would like you eventually, when no you need to actually try even if rejection happens, I honestly wish we had more of this in media than the other garbage morals at the time.

So he prepares to , not helped by her mentioning guy after guy is asking her out.... but before he can F-Stop, the future hotstreak, shows up. F-STOP

That being said...... it’s not as bad as the original gangster name for the comic’s version, Biz Money B. Yes BIZ MONEY B

So yeah while F-Stop is no more intimidating, it at least means I can stop laughing. Francis, because I can’t type F-Stop without laughing and this review is already behind, shoves Virgil out of the way and agressively hits on Frieda, even saying “you smell good”, the international sign your a douchebag and also to call the police. Virgil steps up to the guy and gets PAINFULLY slammed into the lockers, something I give the animation team a lot of credit for, as you can FEEL how fucking painful that was. Virgil is saved by Wade, another local gangbanger who in the comics was a close friend of Virgils but here saves him seemingly just because.. seemingly.

On the way home though Virg’s problems don’t end as naturally, the giant sized asshole with nothing better to do has his goons corner virgil before VIOLENTLY beating him.. off screen but the noises, and the clear brusies including a black eye, on virgil afterwords.. just holy damn i’m suprsied they got away with this but it shows just how horrifing it was and that this is a step above regular bullying, which make no mistake is absoluttley terrible and the series would later do an episode on it and school shootings, into straight up gang violence. Wade shows up again and gets the bastards to flee.. but also makes it clear he can’t keep doing this.. and forces Virgil to meet him at his base under the bridge. And it’s a tense sequence, with Virgil KNOWING this is a bad idea but having no real choice and Wade making it abundantly clear that he wants Virgil to join his crew, and makes a chilling point: while Virgils dad RIGHTFULLY dosen’t want his son to join a gang as Virgil points out.. he can’t be there for him all the time and eventually one of those times, Francis will be around. And he may not surivive that. Virgil nods noncomittaly. At home it gets even more grim as he dosen’t open up to his family, understandably as his dad would jsut say to call the police and well.. we’ve seen how the police treat black people. At best they’d just try and use Virgil as an informant and that likely wouldn’t end fucking well for Virgil. Ritchie points out he can’t join a gang, virgil’s mom died that way.. see told you it’d be important to the plot.. but I like how the story dosen’t offer an easy answer.. well okay he gets electric powers soon enough but without the fantastic element this is just an innocent kid caught between either joining the very thing his mom hated or hoping a system not built to protect him will keep him alive. It’s utterly saddening and chilling and holy shit is it amazing a cartoon in the early 2000′s was able to get away with.. ANY OF THIS, and they handle it great, paired down a bit from the comics but even then it’s still incredibly balsy they got THIS much in.

Naturally Wade calls in his favor and our hero is forced to come running.. and soon finds out Wade’s brought him in for a massive gang war. Welcome to the big bang, baby. He hands Virgil a gun as things get started and Virgil.. drops the thing and tries to escape, in a harrowing sequence.. and runs into Francis because god apparently REALLY hates this kid today. As if to prove that the police show up and while that prevents a beating, they demand they disassemble. then release untested gas on them because of course they do.

As a result the big bang truly begins, with the various gang members getting mutated.. and naturally so does virgil. Though he wakes up the next day seemingly fine. How’d he get home? Does his dad know where he was?

I don’t know and we’re not getting any answers, but Virgil soon finds weird stuff happening like his clock shorting out, change being attracted to him and his razor going wild. It’s only once he get sback to his room he gets an inkling of what’s going on and calls Ritchie to meet him at the Junk yard.. though it is a bit of a dick move as he dosen’t you know, tell him anything about Wade or Francis right away. He does at the yard though.. and that he has powers, having finally figured out how to use them to a point. And the series does provide a decent justification later as to why he’d get this so quickly: Virgil is a smart kid, gets great grades at school and apparnetly there’s even an episode later where he gets a scholarship to a fancy genius school. So him getting how elctromagntisim works or being a quick study on it makes perfect sense.

Richie suggest the obvious.. to become a superhero. And the thought.. hadn’t occured to Virgil. It’s honestly a nice twist on the old trope. That he hadn’t thought of it, not because he’s selfish or any of that or needs to learn a hard lesson, those have been done.. simply because the rush of getting his powers, and implicitly of having a way out of his current predciament, a way to keep Francis off his back and keep Wade from pulling him in further. His own path. But once i’ts brought up.. he jumps on it. Part of it is being a nerd like you or I, of course he wants to.. and being a good intetioned one, he knows this is the right thing to do. It’s waht makes a superhero a hero: Anyone can get powers in a universe like this, esepcailly the dcau, but it takes true courage and heart to use them selflessly and knowing you’ll be in danger. It’s why I love surperheroes: they often didn’t ask for this but they do it anyway because somebody’s gotta. We also get an intresting wrinkle is superman is, at least I think in this episode I could’ve missed it or misremembered things, mentioned as a fictional character. That’s because originally like the comics this wasn’t part of the DCAU.. but eventually the crew decided it shared staff from it, shared a network, both first run and on reruns, why not just make it part of the DCAU proper. I fully support this decisionf: While i’m midly annoyed unlimited never really used anything from static shock outside of Static himself in the time travel episode, despite you know Static and Gear having BEEN to the tower and not being much younger than Kara and defintely older than Courtney, I chalk it up to weird rights issues or something like that. But having Batman, Batman Beyond, Superman, Green Lantern and the Justice League itself all guest star was a good idea, and expanded both static’s universe and gave the DCAU something differnt as most heroes in it were older and more experinced in contrast to the up and coming virgil. Again really would’ve been nice if he and gear could’ve been a part of the expanded league but production might of just been too far ahead or, given he had his own series, they might just have wanted to stick to toher characters. Also begs the question why Icon or Hardware wasn’t adapted for the expanded League but hey, questions for later and the tricky logisitics of the milestone rights might’ve been the issue. I don’t know I wasn’t in the room.

So we get a costume montage, including Black Vulcan from Superfriends, who again ironically would be voiced by Lamarr not too long after this, though weirdly they DON’T use his outfit from the comics for this montage. I mean why not? It fits the gag and would’ve been a good second to last choice.But what could’ve been aside we get our winner and cut back to present day...

Thanks boys. Static finds out one of the things in the warehouse is a shipment of computers for the school and can’t help but show off, showing up to the school, where Frieda and Richie are setting up for the dance, and dropping off the computers, and even saying his catchphrase for the first time “I’ll put a shock to your system” (Which Richie chimes in with awesome line and I agree, great catcphrase), before helping set up and flirting with frieda.

Though as Richtie says he’s a natural. He’s not wrong as he can work a crowd. .but back it up too as his first run out had him easily taking out the crooks, and as many teen superheros and fans of heroes of hte type, myself included will tell you, getting it right in one is not easy. Not even Miles MOrales was immune. All Static needs now is a villian.

And the end of the episode provides one as we see, in horrifc and once again damn suprising detail most of hte new metas aren’t doing so good and are melting and other stuff and we catch up with Francis whose burning up.. and naturally given that hair, though given he named himself F-Stop it’s the least of his problems, he’s got fire powers and escapes to “Have me some fun”

So with that we end episode 1. And it’s excellent, a great way to introduce the hero and while the warehouse opening is a bit superflous, it is a decent addition, showing our heroes first outing in costume and giving us a bit of an action scene to get us through the very heavy rest of the episode. But the rest of the episode is no less grippping, telling the tale of a teen caught in an unwinnable scenario who suddenly finds a way out. And speaking of which waht of Wade? Will we see him again? Is he perhaps Ebon, the series big bad as I thought when I was a kid? What comes of the man who directly caused static’s origin?

Yeahhh that’s the one mistep I think the pilot makes. Frieda is understandable as that was likely a simple change in creative direction. This though? Why build this guy up if your not going to bring him back. I mean where he went was probably the grave, as he probably did due to his mutation, but it’s still VERY weird to spend a whole episode focusing on this guy, building him up as a big personal threat to our hero.. and NOT have him become the series big bad. And maybe he WAS supposed to be ebon and they just changed their mind. I don’t know but it bothers me it bothers me a lot. Otherwise though flawless. ONe more to go.

Aftershock: We open outside an electronics store, as our heroes watch the news reacap what happened in the first episode, with the media dubbing it the Big Bang and revealing their could be hundreds of “Metahumans”, as Virgil dubs after deciding the media’s term “Mutant” dosen’t fit, a nice wink to the fact that that’s the term used in dc comics and I believe milestone but could be wrong there. Me I like the term, has a nice ring to it.

At the store while Richie mulls over waht this means Static finds out he’s a human CD player.... this was before mp3 players and streaming on your phone made them horribly obsolete mind you and if you don’t know what one is congradualtions you live in some sort of bubble and you made me feel really old junior.

Frieda happens to be there and Virgil quips “What’s the matter they run out of britney cds”. Dude she’s not bad. Also be careful what you wish for man. Nickeback returned the year after this. You have not truly suffered through bad music yet my young friend. They spot a kid looking feverish, and he soon turns into a purple werewolf, as you do. It’s a bang baby.. those are richie’s exact word and you may not want to start a panic there bud. Just saying your best friend is one. THeir not all like this. Our heroes book it only to run into Francis who naturally refuses to let them leave and only doesn’t try to beat up Virgil because Virgil points otu the werewolf and nonplussed, he goes to fight it, scarring it off by revealing his own powers. He’s now dubbed himself Hotstreak which points for getting an actually good name kid. No points for what happens next as unsuprisingly getting powers did NOT mak ehim a better person and he attacks Virgil who blocks with a garbage can lid and thankfully is blasted into an ally. Richie tries to guard frieda for damn obvious reasons but gets hsi shirt burnt up because shut up Thankfully Static shows up, and we get our firsdt full on superhuman fight as both fight each other with aplomb, and it’s a damn good fight.. and one that goes pear shaped for Virg as he’s caught off guard when he finds out Hotstreak can use his powers to fly, and tackles him and his previous trauma causes him to freeze up. Thankfully , as Frieda put in a call earlier, the fire department arrive and HOt streak has to retreat, though Virgil is bummed that he “Choked”. And I love this as it not only shows Virgil’s inepxerince, as this is his first time fighting a bad guy but that just because he HAS power now dosen’t mean trauma and his previous fear of Hotstreak goes away or you won’t freeze up from time to time. It dosen’t make him weak or anything like some assholes would call it .. it makes him human. Humans make mistakes, and it makes him all the more relatable that he’s not pefect and that he did freeze up as I know I certainly would at last once in the circumstances.

Things don’t get better at dinner as Sharon and Pops argue over the bang babies with Pops calling them a meance and Sharon pointing out Static exists so they can’t all be bad. See assuming a group of superhumans are bad because a handful of them ar edick sis why the x-men had to get their own island nation. You can only save an ungreatful populous so many times before you say “fuck it i’m getting my own island, pay me for life saving drugs, save your damn selves and stop doing genocides on us. Kay thanks”. But he does bring up a valid point that rattles his son: We don’t know anything about the Bang Babies or their biological structures and it’s likely they might further mutate into monsters, Static included.

Virgil, understandably, wants to check this and thus he and richie compare blood samples in science, to no real conclusion. She he checks out with his doctor who assumes he’s sexually active in a great getting crap past the radar bit and a bit of realisim, but he agrees to the test though if something came up he would have to tell Virgil’s dsad and is up front about this. Nice dose of realisim.

That night City Council has a meeting and the Mayor TRIES to deflect Papa Hawkins questions about the bang babies which again, while being a judgmental ass as not every person hit was a gang member (Virgil, and as we discover later some others), and not every gang member is there by choice, some by circumstnace some, like virgil almost was, because they HAD no other option. Again years of reading x-men may of just made me a bit touchy on assholes admitely assuming superpower people bad. But it’s clear the public is upset and while she says an investigation is underway... Virgil and Richie are not only not convinced, but figure she’s actively covering it up. And unlike everyone else there who probably suspects the same, they can do something about it and tail her. It’s during this, and cleverly as I didn’t realie till writing this using similar skills to his human cd player act, Virgil listens in and discovers whose behind it: Edwin Alva, whose apparently richer than bill gates and a beloved phinarophist Alva, as it turns out, was actually the arch enemy of Hardware in the comics, taking advantage of the guy in his civiliian idtentiy and thus casuing him to launch a war on the asshole. He does transition into this series well though, being the one behind the gas that caused it and with the mayor agreeing to back off, planning to simply dump the info about the big bang on a disc then destroy everything for now till the heat dies down. Yup sounds like a corprate douchebag.

Static tails him, finds the lab and infiltrates it, stealing the disc.. but getting caught by Alva’s goon, and trapped in a glass prison, forced to use ALL his power to escape and barely getting out alive, but not before bouncing off alva’s car. Still he now has the proof.. and meanwhile Hotstreak, who I was wrong did get captured, is forced to take pill sbut spits them out once the orderly is gone. Dude.. WHY DIDN’T YOU WATCH HIM. Make sure he swallows that shit especially since, as he has no powers right now and can’t harm you.

Hotstreak escapes off screen and our heroes discuss the disc before he shows up, and we get a REALLY fucking amazing scene: Virgil ducks into an Alleway and ritchie is worried.. and Virgil disarms him with just one word responses Ritchie: Virg you can’t take him. Virgil: Gotta. Ritchie: Well at least wait for the fire department Virgil: Can’t. It’s simpile but it gets the point across: This is his fight, he can’t wait for help, and people need him. And this is what makes a true hero: It’s easy to be a hero when everythings going well.. but it’s the true ones who stick it out against the odds and fight anyway. And he’s going to. So we get one hell of a fight, though naturally Hotstreak burns up the disc. And I do like this as it dosen’t feel contrived.. yes Static could’ve left it with ritchie.. but he wasn’t thinking in the moment and dind’t really have time to think abotu the disc, only that people were being hurt and he was all they had between them and Hotstreak. It was no choice at all. Still that pisses Virgil off that the last night’s work is now worthless, and he fully charges up and curbstomps francis who retreats into a clearing. Hostreak brags when static follows, as even he’s figured out Static needs to be around metal, as he’s usually on his disc or the street, and in the park there suppodsidly isn’t any. But he’s not THAT smart as Virgil points out two things: one, he hoped to do this on PURPOSE so they wouldn’t be around people and no on e would get hurt and 2).. this is a city, there’s metal everywhere.. and he awesomely and cleverly proves it by unlodging a sewage pipe with his powers and dousing his foe, winning and proving his stuff. I love this solution, it’s a clever spider-man type way to disarm him, using smarts and the einvroment instead of just brute forcing it. Though the sewage part wasn’t intetional our hero still won and gets praise from the people dumb enough to follow the fight.

However at home Virgil points out it was Pyrrhic Victory and shows off his smarts by telling the tale behind it, which I didn’t know,because tv tropes didn’t exist yet: king pyrhus fought the romans and WON.. but had so little armies left that he still lost overall. That’s what this feels like to Virgil: he beat hotstreak but any chance at a cure for Bang Babies and Alva going to jail for causing them is gone. His mood does get a boost though as the doctor calls and reveals he’s fine, he just has a bit too much elctrolytes and just needs to lay off teh salt. He celebrates, we get a quick gag and the episode ends

Aftershock is another stellar episoe, giving us Virgil’s first super foe and a personal one at that, while showing some growth. As richie tells him he’s not virgil anymore he’s static and he can’t let his past get to him.. and he does’nt going from cowering in fear to easily beating his foe with simple logic. It’s a good followup that answers questions you may have from the first ep, like what does this do to virgil’s body, who supplied the gas, and why has no one done anything about this, and sets up another villian for Static in Alva. Great stuff. I highly recommend these episodes and the show as a whole: it’s fast paced, grounded and enjoyable, having just enough levity to not be too dour but just enough tension and stakes to be intresting. A throughly fantastic superhero show and one that i’d certainly love to revisit on this blog If you have an episode of static or the dcau in general you’d want me to cover, my comissions are open and details are on a tab on my blog or can be gotten simply by asking me via ask or dm. Tommorow we’re going deeper underground, there’s too much damage in this town as the Lena Retrospective continues. So expect gay ducks, straight ducks and some terrfirmains. See you next rainbow.

#static shock #static #virgil hawkins #richie foley #robert hawkins #sharon hawkins #hotstreak #milestone comics #dc comics #dc animated universe #dcau #dwayne mcduffie #robert l washington IIII #kids wb #hbo max #2000s #animation #black lives matter #black history month

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xrawanger007 · 3 years ago

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Tim Drake goes to University?!?

Would anyone read a story, hypothetically if I wrote it, where Tim quits being Red Robin and the Batfam, only Alfred and Cass would know though, and the Titans, and just go to University.

Like he gets his High School Diploma online by just taking classes online and so forth, also he was tired of everyone’s teasing and decided to go back to High School and graduated with top honors.

But he goes to ESU, and there he would meet like Peter Parker, Johnny Storm, Bobby Drake (Ironic) and a bunch of other characters.

So basically Tim would be-friend like a shit ton of Marvel characters but they are all actually civilians which is why there isn’t Spider-Man or the X-Men flying around.

He would do things that he always wanted to but wasn’t allowed to, like get a dog or two (I have an idea on what breed and the names), get an earing, a tattoo on his back of a Robin or a Robin’s feather, have a truly healthy relationship with a girl where no-one manipulates one another and have no secrets between one another (May have hit a sore spot there). Dye his hair? Don’t know about that one though.

I also think Tim being like pseudo adopted by Tony Stark would be funny, as Tony would do it to piss off Bruce but also because this kid is just fun to hang around.

Then like there will be eventual conflict where the Bats (Except Cass and Alfred) go ‘oh darn Timmy quit’ but they would find out because he was all over the news that he attended with a mystery girl (and because of a list I saw, and being a fan of Ultimate Spider-Man, it would probably be Kitty Pryde or someone like that) and they’ll be like ‘hey when did he leave?’ and Alfred will roll up the sleeves and make them all feel worthless, and Cass would shake her head in disappointment.

And potentially maybe like later on part of a Student Exchange Program some students from France come to America and Tim meets Marinette Dupain-Cheng and obviously the two friend groups hit it off, and end up getting closets custom made by MDC in exchange that they model the clothes for her website. (To which Johnny would squeal in delight)

I don’t know I have like a massive story in head that would probably be hard to write, but hey kind of depends if people would like to read that I guess.

Plus, Cass would eventually quit and go live with Tim because she wanted to be more than she was and thought Tim knew how to do that properly as he did it successfully.

Please leave a comment or suggestion whether you would read this please.

#tim drake #peter parker #johnny storm #kitty pryde #cassandra cain #alfred pennyworth #bobby drake #felicia hardy #crystal amaquelin #tony stark #bruce wayne

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hellyeahheroes · 4 years ago

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Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales story and character review

So let’s state a disclaimer, I didn’t like the PS4 Miles character as it was blatantly clear that they never read a Miles story with the actual mistakes they made(Miles going to the wrong school, Rio being a science teacher, Jefferson loving vigilantes/supers, using MJ as an origin for Miles, the skin lightening of both Miles and Rio). It was insulting because they clearly researched and had a fidelity to Peter Parker as they had references from both of the 616 and Ultimate Universes but with Miles, they somehow missed the first thing about Miles: he doesn’t want to be Spider-Man. I didn’t like this version. Notice the past tense.

Miles Morales PS5 redeemed him. I am half-way as I’ve done all of the side quests and pretty much half of the main story. And I also seen the whole main story on YouTube. So yeah.

First off, the first thing I noticed about Miles was his fresh-cut. It was, to quote my brother, “a hot mess” in the first game. I was delighted to hear that the first thing the “black” consultant told the Insomniac developers. His edge was fucked up. Second thing was how social Miles was. Third thing is that they retconned Miles going to Midtown. Yes, in the first thing they did actually have kid in Brooklyn attend a public school in Queens. I am pretty sure in the remaster the changed it to Brooklyn Visions.

These changes along with the fidelity of the relationship between Miles and Ganke were what sold me on this version of the character. I get it. No one wants Peter to die and honestly, they probably should have just used Anya, but Miles is popular now and it’d be stupid to just not capitalize.

So let’s talk about a few characters starting with the actual main character of the game: The Tinkerer.

Let me tell you that at first I thought she was redundant. I am not going to spoil it, but it was obvious the moment she is introduced in the game and Miles mentioned her twice before she is formally introduced. It’s clear that she was the focus. I felt that she was redundant because there is a literal harem of morally dubious women who Miles has a close connection to that she takes aspects from. Tinkerer is an amalgamation of all of them. She is a girl leading a gang(Diamondback/Tomoe) who is a genius inventor(Ceres). She wants revenge against a company that is poisoning the city and killed her brother so she becomes a ruthless vigilante(Tiana). Her powers or devices are that she manipulates a metal to form any shape she wants(Tomoe). Her relationship of Miles is one that is really platonic with some romantic undertones(literally every single person that I mentioned) but it is torn apart because Miles lies and keeps secrets from her(Katie Bishop).

What sold me on her character is the work they did in her collectibles which I implore you to collect because they provide so much depth to her character and also, it doesn’t really bother to explain Miles’ character in this world but hers. This girl is hurt because her loved one was killed and she saw Miles as family or a second brother. They hung out together and as soon as Miles went to Visions, they drifted apart. I’ve always wondered about the kids Miles left in his whole transfer situation and Tinkerer was one of them. Her pathos and identity is very much tied to Miles. And I love her.

Look, at first, I was reluctant to want her in the main comic, but someone put in too much work to not include her in Miles’ main rogues gallery. I hope that Saladin sees it and implements a version of her in the MM: Spider-Man comic. She also reminds me of Gear from Static Shock except she is not a gay white man.

Ganke was spot on. This is the best adaptation of Ganke I’ve seen.

Yes even better than Homecoming.

Ganke is part of Miles’ Spider-Man. He is not just the fat Asian kid providing tech support. He is the motivation and is apart of it too unlike the thing they tried to do with MJ and Peter in the first game. This also shows the clear contrast of Peter and Miles. Peter never trusted anyone enough to be that involved in his being of Spider-Man. Miles knows that he can’t do it alone and relies on Ganke for information gathering and webs. Ganke is important and this game nailed it.

Aaron Davis is in this game and no one is surprised. This version of Aaron...is different. Okay in the comics, he is a foil to Miles in that while Miles is becoming more heroic, Aaron is becoming more villainous. It’s no coincidence that Spider-Man and the Prowler look similar but the gist is that if Miles didn’t get bit by the spider, Miles would have become Prowler 2.0. The game eschews this dynamic because it is hard to pull that off after the mangled Miles’ origin so they opted for the Prowler to foil Miles in a different way: keeping secrets from family and friends and being protective of family because fear of loss. Aaron, after losing his brother and never getting a chance to reconcile with him, is hurt and wants to protect Miles and subsequently Rio. Miles, throughout the game, is becoming increasingly worried about his mom running for city council and painting a target on his back. He shows his frustration and distances himself from his mother in his work as Spider-Man. Aaron does the same to Miles when he finds out that he Spider-Man. There comes a point where the two collide and Aaron goes further into the extreme which I won’t spoil. You get it.

This change, while different, isn’t terrible. It’s actually really well thought out. It accomplishes the same thing in that Aaron is not a good role model but he is a good person to Miles. It allows Miles to reflect on his own behavior towards his mother. So I’m with it.

Oh and before I forget, Danika being in this game sold me that they actually started actually researching Miles. They ignored the weird racial commentary that she became enamores and she became a foil to JJJ. A voice of youthful and helpful positivity vs Randian cynicism and skepticism. A social justice activist vs an arrogant self important commentator. And it was fun listening to her. Hopefully Saladin brings her back. I am currently on Underground base liberation missions where she teams up with Ganke and Miles in putting them down. Just started, but there was already some mild hint that Ganke is crushing on her(they are a couple in the comics). So yeah.

The cons because like Ganke, I love pros and cons list. Two things about this game annoys me. First, the move to Harlem and this forced narrative of Miles being Harlem’s Spider-Man made no sense because just look at the map. Harlem is part of Manhattan. There is nothing stopping Peter from visiting Harlem regularly. Brooklyn, however, would justify having their own Spider-Man. As, if you didn’t know, Brooklyn is emerging into becoming the next big city as the area is thriving. Also, gentrification. Point is there is a reason why Miles connection to Brooklyn is important. It is foil to Peter who is from Queens and wanted to move into Manhattan island because part of it was he saw it as a measure of success to get out of the old neighborhood and make it big. Miles loves Brooklyn and doesn’t want to move out. Trying to replicate his love for his city in Harlem just because it’s predominantly black and brown is lazy and honestly if they included Brooklyn in the game, it would have justified the price of this game. Which brings me to the second point.

This game is too short on content to be costing $50 dollars. Just to point out something, all of the DLC from the first game cost 10 bucks a pop and you had as much content in those three expansions as you do this game. Infamous First Light was the same exact thing in relation to Infamous Second Sons and it cost 30 bucks. Uncharted Lost Legacy cost 30 dollars. I could go on. Point is that it shouldn’t have costed nearly the price of a full game when in comparison to the previous iteration, it wasn’t. Now I’ve seen people say that hating because it’s short isn’t warranted or pull up this quoted fact that video games are too long. Anti-consumerist bullshit aside, the difference between the main storyline of the previous game and this one is not repetition. It’s the lack of variety in enemies and deesculating storylines. In the first game, there were a variety of enemies that had their own AI and attacks. And you adjusted accordingly to whom you were facing. There were classes of enemies within the variety. You had the rudimentary common criminal which had 4 classes and how to deal with them and from that point, each enemy afterwards were variations of those four classes and each provided a different challenge. The repetition wasn’t boring because it provided a new challenge. This game only gives you three types of enemies and while 2 are vastly different from anything in the previous game or it’s expansions, the need to limit the series to focus on narrative becomes unwarranted because you are still getting less for nearly the same price.

That’s all. Have a great day. It was a fun game. Really.

@ubernegro

#miles morales #spider-man ps5 #marvel’s spider man: miles morales

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thedoctornumber11 · 4 years ago

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Munday post

I figured maybe this week I’d do a different type of Munday. Most of my long time roleplay partners already know me quite a bit and I also try to introduce myself to newer partners as well, however I figured this could be a good chance for everyone to really get to know me. I’m including everything under a read more not because long post and also because I know not everyone likes seeing this type of thing. It’s just a bunch of random facts about me and my favorite things along with a munday pic under the cut. I didn’t want to just throw out a munday picture like most would do. I’ve done that plenty of times before and there’s nothing wrong with it, I just felt like doing something a bit more unique and different this time that might really give people a chance to get to know me :D

So long post under the cut.

So, first off, my name is Derek. I’m the mun. I just recently turned 30 and I’m from Indiana. I work in a preschool, essentially as a glorified baby sitter. I help the teachers get their breaks.

I’ve been interacting on here since November of 2013 and I’ve had this exact blog with this exact URL the entire time. I wanted something really generic and not just a quote or something like that. I first tried TheEleventhDoctor, but obviously that was taken so this ended up being what I went with. As for the theme, it too was made a VERY long time ago. The TARDIS theme with the opening doors on the TARDIS actually used to be quite popular when I first started interacting on here, particularly with the Doctor Who RP fandom. Although I’m the only one I see with it these days, if you go looking for older Doctor Who blogs that have gone inactive you are actually likely to find a few other blogs with it. As for the background picture, I found that one myself except for the part with Matt Smith/The Eleventh Doctor edited on. That part was done by someone I used to interact with who just surprised me with it one day and unfortunately isn’t on Tumblr anymore :( Having been on this platform for so long I’ve obviously seen a lot of blogs come and go and I miss every single last one of them :( However I also enjoy everyone I currently interact with and would recommend almost any of them. Seriously, if anyone is looking for new people to interact with, let me know you are looking for people and what fandoms you enjoy and I can probably recommend a few blogs!

Outside of Tumblr RP, I enjoy video games, yugioh, reading comics, general super hero related stuff, watching movies, playing Pokemon Go (I help run the local PoGo community) general board games, watching my shows, figure collecting, and cosplay, most of which I’m sure is stuff many of you also enjoy. My fandoms include Doctor Who (obviously), DC, Star Wars, The Legend of Korra/ATLA (I’m one of the few that likes LoK more than ATLA), Marvel, Star Trek, Firefly, Power Rangers, The Walking Dead, Yugioh, Pokemon, Sherlock, general Nintendo fandom, Digimon and Harry Potter.

Here’s a few things about me in list form.

My favorite musician is Weird Al Yankovic.

My favorite book is Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robbison. As someone who’s been diagnosed with aspergers syndrome myself, this book really spoke to me in my original read through and since then I’ve purchased it multiple times. I own at least three or four different copies of this book, partially because I kept loaning it out to people.

My favorite book series is the Harry Potter series. Don’t ask me for a favorite book in the series, I love them all about equally.

As for comics, right now my favorite thing I’m reading is the Power Rangers series that Boom is putting out. Some of my favorites of all time include Power Ranger Soul of the Dragon, the Star Trek TNG/Doctor Who crossover, the Power Rangers/Justice League Crossover, the original Spider-Gwen series, Poison Ivy Cycle of Life and Death, The Dark Knight Returns (I know anything Frank Miller related is a bit controversial but I enjoy it for what it is) and Batman: Hush.

Favorite movies include UHF, Scott Pilgrim VS the World, Captain America The Winter Soldier, Captain America the First Avenger, Avengers End Game, the Justice League movie, anything and everything DC animated, anything and everything Spider-Man related (yes, I even like Spider-Man 3 although it wasn’t as good as the others), anything Star Wars related although I’d say Force Awakens is my favorite one, the 2017 Power Rangers movie, Serenity, The Lego movie and it’s sequel, Yugioh Bonds Beyond Time, Mystery Men, Galaxy Quest, all the Star Trek movies, the corny 90′s Mario movie, the Doctor Who movie, and Detective Pikachu. Really, any of the Marvel and DC movies could probably make this list as well, I’m not super picky when it comes to movies.

Favorite TV shows is something I am a bit pickier about. Doctor Who is obviously on the list, and I’ve watched and enjoyed most of the Marvel and DC live action stuff although I have a huge preference for the arrowverse and 70′s Wonder Woman. Animated stuff tends to vary but a lot of the older stuff from the early and mid 90′s seems to be best for that. Power Rangers is obviously on the list as well, along with The Walking Dead, Digimon, Avatar the Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra, Sherlock, Yugioh, Firefly, and off the top of my head that’s about it. Everyone always assumes I’m huge into anime as well, but I’m not actually that into it. Just not my thing.

Now video games has potential to be my longest list as it’s easily my favorite medium of story telling due to the interactivity. First off, Nintendo and Playstation are my general consoles of choice. Nothing against Xbox, I have a lot of respect for the brand but I can’t really afford to have three consoles (even though I wish I could) and Nintendo and Sony have more offerings for me personally. I also do dabble on PC a bit, but I don’t really have a high end PC and it’s mostly just for Sims. That being said, my favorite games and game series include Watch_Dogs, The Sims, Mario (mostly the “main series,” 3D games and 2D platformers but I do enjoy some of the off series stuff like Mario Kart and Mario Party as well) , Pokemon, Super Smash Brothers, The Force Unleashed series, Injustice, most of the Spider-Man games, The Last of Us, Tomb Raider, most of the Batman games, Wario Ware, The Last of Us (still haven’t played the sequel yet. Waiting to get it for cheap after seeing reviews), Days Gone, Control, Horizon Zero Dawn, No Man’s Sky, 51 Worldwide Classics for Switch, No Man’s Sky, the Tony Hawk Games (still haven’t played the new one yet), Time Splitters, The Movies, Hulk Ultimate Destruction, Zombies Ate My Neighbhors, Kirby, The Legend of Korra game (the 3d one, not the really bad one for 3DS), Donkey Kong, Street Fighter 2, Punch Out, Metal Gear Solid 5 the Phantom Pain, Sonic Heroes, and the list could go on and on.

My favorite drink is root beer or chocolate milkshakes if that counts

My favorite alcoholic drink is probably just a basic screwdriver tbh

My favorite food is Cheeseburgers, although Chicken Pot Pie is also a top contender tbh

My favorite color is green

My favorite Doctor is Eleventh obviously, but Thirteen, Two and Twelve are tied for second

Favorite companions are Amy, River (if she counts), and Donna

Favorite New Who episode is The Eleventh Hour

Favorite Classic Who story is Genesis of the Daleks

Since I’ve mentioned super heroes a lot, my favorites are Batman, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man, although Supergirl, Batgirl, Captain America, Scarlet Witch and Black Widow are also pretty high on the list.

Favorite game in the Pokemon series is X and Y

Dragonite is my favorite Pokemon

Favorite 3D Mario game is Odyssey although Sunshine would be next up on the list.

This is my only Tumblr RP blog. I also have an ask meme blog and I used to have a personal but I haven’t logged onto it in years.

I’m on discord and I do add people from Tumblr on there, but I mostly only use it for Pokemon Go tbh

I spend every Wednesday and Sunday at the local comic book shop playing Yugioh

For anyone wondering in relation to that last fact, my current competitive deck Barrier Stun. Some of my favorite casual decks that I play or have played in the past are Lightsworn, Blue-Eyes, E-Heroes, Greed, Sacred Beasts, Penguins and Six Samurai.

In the last decade I’ve moved about 3 times

I own pets! I have one dog and one cat currently, but a few years back when we lived in a more country like setting, we owned 7 cats and 2 dogs at maximum. Most of them died of old age over the last few years.

Before my current job I used to work at Walmart. Long time followers of the blog may remember that I hated it there.

I don’t have a whole lot of writing experience outside of Tumblr tbh. While I do enjoy writing on here, it’s the interactions itself that makes it fun for me and while I’ve tried to write a few things myself, it’s just not the same as roleplay.

Anyway, I just sort of wanted to do something different for munday besides just posting pictures of myself so I hope anyone who read this enjoyed it. Here’s a pic of the mun to go with it.

#munday #ooc #long post #Honestly I just felt like writing this all out for some reason

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