#that “so is it true? bruce?” was perfectly delivered i was devastated the way he said his name oh my god

[sparkleofstardust]

so it turns out that you get a different dialogue when you finish the two face sidequest after the main story

what an interesting way to address the different facets of bruce wayne and batman. and to see how confident harvey is in his assessment of what the "real" face is. makes you really wonder how well harvey and bruce truly knew each other

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

i preserved in him what he needed to believe about you.

i wrote yesterday that this episode had a lot riding on it. for the most part, it delivered--mostly in anchoring both dick and slade’s arcs, expanding on the themes introduced in s2, and in firmly establishing jericho as My Favourite Forever And Ever. it was also very flawed, but in (mostly) interesting ways. let’s talk about it!

SPOILERS ahead.

1. jericho has my whole heart and then some. i think it would’ve been very easy to paint him with broad strokes--my fear was they would drag the innocence all the way to the edge of infantilisation, which, good god NO--but while he is enthusiastic and ready to believe the best of both his friends and family, there’s a sharpness to him, a kind of reckless guile, and quite a lot of unresolved and complicated feelings about father figures. 

1.25. he is obviously very proud of his father having served in the military--he’s even tangentially aware that he was experimented on, given his nonchalant attribution of his own powers to “drugs” that his father took while serving. (this awareness has to include the fact that his father definitely took a number of lives as a soldier.) even the awful assault that took away his voice and eventually his father from his life tracks with a single, knowable truth. knowing this helped him ground his own identity--the problem comes when he realises that what he’d used to build himself on was itself built on a lie. 

there is a tension, then, between his loyalty to these friends who used him but ultimately revealed the truth to him, and his desire to have that cornerstone of his life back. his compromise is to talk to his father, but only with dick’s permission; in it, he would know if his father was finally ready to be completely honest with him, and if there was more to dick’s friendship than merely using jericho to get to his father.

1.3. of course, it doesn’t exactly work that way: in the final fight at the church, there are two men who insist on their truth while pushing him to the side. in it, he sees one of them ruthlessly cut down the other, and he sees the other using his own body and life to protect him. jericho makes his choice in the end.

1.45. dick i think was absolutely right and justified in bringing jericho to a safe place where he can explore and learn to control his powers, even if dick was surprisingly blase about the potential ethical tangles of being able to possess other people’s bodies without them being aware of it. it was honestly a bit disturbing to see that hank was chosen to demonstrate jericho’s powers, given his history and the fact that he describes the experience as a “blackout”. i’m just going to assume that he would’ve come around to it eventually.

given the relative paucity of Big Bads and grand superhero battles, i’m kind of taken with the idea of the titans essentially being a support group for young troubled superheroes who need help and training and ways to ground themselves before heading back to their corners of the world. 

1.5. ultimately this episode once again drives home what should be the essential question in a show that revolves around a team of superhero sidekicks: are we destined to be what we were moulded to be? is the point of their existence to perpetuate what their mentors/fathers did? slade and jericho both struggle with this; so do dick and donna in this episode. so do rose, and jason, and rachel, and conner, and kory in the broader context of the series. the answers they find are complicated and at the cost of a great deal of pain, but the process is always interesting.

1.8. obviously jericho isn’t actually dead. i wonder what that initial dreamscape sequence was all about? is it some secret pocket dimension that jericho jumped into at the last minute when slade killed his body? is that where he’s been for the last five years?

2. dick grayson is lost. he is utterly buried under artifice and armour. i mentioned in a previous post (i think the one for 2.07) that he performs quite a bit of emotional labour for the team on top of being their leader in a tactical sense. here, he’s trying to hold it together for the team after a devastating death; he’s spearheading an effort for revenge he thought they all supported. he pulls on batman-goggles, trying to look at what he’s doing from a logical, emotionally-removed perspective, even while burying his bleeding heart as deep as he possibly can. no wonder he’s acting “like a ghost” and “burning at both ends”--it’s a terrible burden to bear. 

then the team turns around--once they’ve already gotten the info they needed, mind!--and tells him to cut jericho out of this operation; that it’s wrong and awful to have involved him at all. when he tries to do just that, he sees that he can actually help jericho as a friend and teammate, and at the urging of dawn, comes clean to him. meanwhile garth’s death and donna’s grief is still an unrelenting pressure on the back of his neck, driving him to find deathstroke at any cost--except when that cost is betraying jericho’s trust. ultimately slade nearly murdering donna is what breaks him--and he decides to follow jericho to slade anyway.

at every point he is so desperately trying to do good by everybody that he loses himself in the process. that his reward for this is being beaten up, a truckload of survivor’s guilt, and being abandoned by his closest friends is just so fucking awful. his friends are so used to his artifice and he is so used to absorbing all the blame that they think nothing of both praising him for being someone that saves people and believing he would sacrifice innocent lives for the sake of a mission in the same day.

(but this makes dick/kory so beautiful and refreshing--she has no time for his artifice and he doesn’t have to Be Someone around her. their relationship is defined by being undefined, and in that sense--at least for now--both of them find peace in the other.)

2.5. slade commenting coldly on dick’s fighting skills and the way he uses dick’s feelings for jericho to distract and defeat him makes me think that slade’s been playing this game with dick for far longer than he was aware: slade used both jericho and donna as bait to lure dick to that church, fought him in a cold, critical way undoubtedly reminiscent of a thousand sparring sessions with batman, and drove him utterly to the ground not just to prove a point to the titans and the superhero community at large but to jericho as well: this man is weak, manipulative, and ultimately a poor substitute for slade. 

2.75. who knows for how long dick wallowed in his failure, still seeing jericho take the blade that was meant for him, utterly alone? did he go back to the batcave, utterly defeated, and did he listen to bruce call him out on his mistakes? how much do you think he internalised all the terrible things he’d been told he was until he believed it all to be true? until he couldn’t live with himself and spiralled and spiralled until his self-hatred lead to outright self-destruction?

like--no wonder he completely fell apart in the present day when deathstroke showed up again. he’d just started to trust--he’d just started to build a family again. and here it is, a reminder of his biggest failure threatening to have him fail spectacularly once again. 

... this boy needs so much therapy. or at least a long nap and a series of hugs.

2.8. (that fight between him and slade tho... goddamn. even my shitty quality stream couldn’t take away from how thrilling it was to watch.)

3. dawn is... well. i know it’s been frustrating to follow dawn this season, as she’s been either non-existent or, uh, flat, but there was something interesting in the way her dynamic with dick moved and shifted in this episode. she thrills to ideals without considering the consequences of actually following those ideals. in the space of a few months, she can implore dick to act like batman, then tell him no, she was wrong to have asked him to do that, then say that she loved him for saving people and then barely days later abandon him for being a reckless sociopath who exploited innocent lives. in the present day, she can support hank in his retirement and rehabilitative process, yet still think it’s perfectly ok to go behind his back and continue being a vigilante. she supported protecting rose in the tower but still piled on dick for going off on his reckless suicide mission to try and save both jason and rose. she endorsed (and once praised) dick taking on troubled young superhero charges, yet turned around and berated him for daring to open up titans tower and “put them in the firing line”. 

i mean, for all that she takes the considerate, sensitive line in conversations, it’s almost always in contradiction to a position she’d taken earlier. it’s too consistent to be a coincidence, and i think it’s fascinating.

4. i didn’t realise amazons could be defeated and killed so easily?? who issued the contract to kill jillian in the first place and what was the “important work” they were doing in san francisco in the first place? a mystery within a mystery...

5. if this season were the draft of a story, i would go right in with a red pen and start moving around all the parts to make it flow better; excise entire passages and rewrite a few others. the pacing has been terrible, and this has meant that the younger titans--and the team we came to know and love through the first season--have gotten almost nothing to do, either plot-wise or emotionally. even if kory and gar and rachel become absolutely vital to the story in the last 4-5 episodes, it would still be a fairly significant failure, storytelling-wise.

that’s a pity because this show is packed with a stellar cast, always looks gorgeous, and is filled with genuinely insightful human relationships that are allowed to unfold in ways you just don’t see in other superhero media. just--*vibrates* a little more love and care from the people making and producing the show please!

[rankakiu]

Thoughts of the Droid: Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Hello, Tumblr people! How life treats you? As always, I hope very well. Finally, I was presented with the perfect opportunity to see one of the most anticipated superhero films of this year: Avengers: Endgame, is a production that closes with 10 years of stories about heroism and of course, a decade of success for Marvel Studios.

WARNING: NOT SPOILER-FREE. Read at your own risk

Entering already full to the review, what did I think the movie? Short answer: While it is not up to Infinity War, it is a great movie by itself. Now we go with more details. 

Characters: Basically our favorite characters are still faithful to themselves. In Infinity War, we saw our heroes dead of fear and full of uncertainty; in this film is when we can see them completely broken, with their confidence on the floor and generally affected to know that they have not been able to save the world (and the universe). We see them struggling to adapt to a new world with half of their lives destroyed, a hostile environment that constantly reminds them of their failure as heroes and as humans. And even though they find Thanos and have a brief fight where they easily defeat the Crazy Titan, their feeling of emptiness gets worse, knowing that they can do nothing to reverse the situation ... or do they?

At this point, it could be said that the character of Scott Lang, when speaking to them about the quantum realm and his theory of time travel, causes the hopes of the Avengers to be reborn. Hence, our characters face various conflicts, mostly emotional, to know that many of them were not in the best friendly relationships, but even so, leave all that aside to focus on a common goal: to collect the gems of the infinite and thus have a possibility, not only to beat Thanos, but to fix everything.

History: It is at this point where I will be honest with you. The truth expected a different and more epic story. I do not know, a story where the surviving Avengers faced Thanos but seeing the inordinate power of the Crazy Titan, they would flee and from there formulate a time travel plan to collect the gems and that Thanos knowing that, would also travel to time to stop them. I expected a conflict that was even superior to the one shown in Infinity War. Instead, I saw a somewhat simpler story without so much epic tinge, so I was a little disappointed.

But why is history bad? Of course not. In fact, it is interesting to note that the story in Infinity War is about the villain, his background and motivations, why he does what he does. And they formulate it so well, that the spectator can sympathize in Thanos's crusade, leaving a bittersweet feeling: you can understand that his goal is to a certain noble point, but you do not agree with the method with which he wants to carry out his goal. On the other hand, in Endgame, it is a film that deals more with our heroes, to see them at first deal with their failure, and then see how hope is reborn in them and how they finally come together to carry out their plan, where they return to work as a real team, not as superheroes, but as brothers. It is a story where we see how the most powerful heroes of the planet seek on this journey to heal their wounds and in fact, this is what the story of the film is about: a healing process and with which they will seek redemption.

Speaking more about history, time travel seemed very successful, since it is here where we see our heroes more emotional than ever and that we can appreciate their human side much more. They face a mental challenge that supposes a hypothetical trip in the time, but in addition, they face an emotional challenge, that supposes being with a loved one, or facing a difficult decision of life and death. 

In the first case, we have Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, where Rogers looks with yearning and longing for Peggy Carter, the woman he loved the most in the world. We see him contemplate it with nostalgia and with the tension that supposes that Rogers can make the mistake of wanting to go see her. You can see that his conflict is more about deciding between meeting her or faithfully following her mission of collecting the gem of infinity. In the end, he chooses wisely to continue your mission for the greater good.

In Stark's case, we can clearly see all the overwhelming range of emotions he feels when meeting his father. And I found it quite interesting that they had a talk about the family and that in fact, it was the son who advised the father on this subject. Their meeting can be described as extremely moving.

In the second case, it is up to Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff. It is here where you can witness the great friendship that both had. Long before their time travel, the viewer can witness how Black Widow is devastated to learn how his friend lost his entire family at the hands of Thanos and how later Hawkeye became a vigilant too vengeful, as a way to discharge his anger and resentment against the world and destiny. The scene where they finally meet face to face is one of the best in the film, as Natasha offers Clint the opportunity to recover his family and after a few moments of doubt, he agrees to help the Avengers.

Of course, I could not stop mentioning the peak scene of these two companions that occurs in the Planet Vormir, where you can still appreciate the great friendship that both have. And this can be appreciated even more when they discover that a sacrifice is necessary to possess the Gem of the Soul. The brief fight between the two is intense and full of tension, where one as a spectator eats the nails and wishes that neither of them dies. And in the end, Natasha, in an act of true friendship and camaraderie, sacrifices herself so that Clint can not only get the gem but also continue with the mission of defeating Thanos so he can return to see his family. A most moving scene without a doubt.

The third case, we see Thor and Rocket Raccoon travel to the past, specifically to the lands of Asgard when they were in full glory. Thor cannot help but feel a certain nostalgia and above all the need to see, even for the last time, his mother, Frigga. Rocket Raccoon would be the comic relief for the situation, it is also the voice of reason for Thor, for the god of thunder to focus on his mission. Certainly, the conversation that mother and son hold is very endearing, it is in its pure sense, a conversation in which the mother gives valuable lessons and advice to her son, above all, the lesson that the past must let go to face the present , a mother who gives encouragement and emotional support to her son, when he most needed it. A scene very well carried out.

The fourth case, we have Bruce Banner, the Hulk, being face to face with the Ancient One, where we see that she also fought against the first invasion of Thanos, in New York, making sure that the Sanctum Sanctorum she was guarding did not fall into enemy hands. I do not have much to emphasize about this particular scene, except for the fact of its importance in history, since we see how Banner, using his intellect and tenacity, tries, by all means, to convince Ancient One to deliver the Gem of the Time, which she does when he mentions that Stephen Strange gave Thanos that gem in the present timeline. With this, the Ancient One seems to realize the whole plan of her pupil.

The fifth case that concerns us, You can see a great evolution in the character of Nebula, where she has a somewhat unpleasant encounter with her past self and her sister Gamora. Nebula tries to convince her self of the past that Thanos's goal is totally wrong and that she can free herself from her bonds and be someone else by herself. The conflict that arises between the two Nebulas is quite interesting in my opinion. The Nebula of the present is quite clear that she wants to be, while the Nebula of the past seeks to define herself by having her father Thanos as the most fundamental of her life.

She is presented with the perfect opportunity and the Nebula of the past does not hesitate for a second to take it since her obsession was too much to receive recognition from his father. That is why both the Nebula of the present and Gamora knew that it was impossible to save the Nebula from the past, for which they had no choice but to kill her.

We arrive at the scene of the final battle, where Thanos maintains his initial objective but now he wants to carry it out on a much larger scale, to eliminate half of the universe to eliminate ALL the universe and from there create another more prosperous one. The Avengers face the Crazy Titan in an epic fight, where despite the power of Thanos, there is an improvement in the Avengers, where they now perfectly know the kind of enemy they face.

Thanos keeps showing they why he is powerful, but the Avengers fight with more security and determination, which ends up delivering a very memorable battle. The climax of the fight reaches its point when those killed by the power of the gauntlet arrive on the scene of the fight and launch themselves into the charge against Thanos and his army. In the end, the Avengers win the match thanks to Tony Stark, who seizes the Gems of Infinity and with snapping his fingers disintegrates Thanos himself and his army. It is noteworthy here that when Thanos witnesses how his army fades, he goes through the same phases as the Avengers in Infinity War: First he looks in disbelief, then he feels fear and in the end (unlike the Avengers) he understands that he has lost war, he sits down and with it he resigns himself to death. If you ask me this is a worthy ending for a villain of his size.

Finally, the film closes with an emotional funeral in memory of Tony Stark, where we appreciate all the heroes and acquaintances of the deceased saying goodbye to him with melancholy, where they know that the world has lost one of its great and irreplaceable heroes. We also have Steve Rogers returns the gems of the infinite and stayed a lifetime in his timeline, fulfilling his dream of sharing his life with Peggy Carter. We see him return to the present, already aged and gives a last act both a superhero and human: bequeath his shield and with it his name to Sam Wilson, to Falcon, so that this is the new Captain America.

Certainly, it seemed appropriate that they also give this closure with the character of Captain America, we're probably in a future movie they mention that he has died of natural causes.

In general, Avengers: Endgame handles a very good story, solid and that keeps you attentive, making your three hours of duration go completely unnoticed.

Visual and special effects: Being a super production and even more a superhero tape, the visuals must be impeccable and fortunately Avengers: Endgame fulfills very well and thoroughly with this point. We know that many of the scenarios, creatures and the odd character are made by computer, but they make it feel that it feels completely real. In addition, they are also used to make the powers of different characters shine in all their glory. You can be calm, the visuals are perfect.

Action: While there are several action scenes, I feel that they were a little short, since most of this is only seen until the final confrontation with Thanos, that although I will not deny that it is one of the best achieved, I would have liked to see at least half of that action in other scenes. But I'm not complaining anyway. The action is exciting and overwhelming, especially in the epic final duel.

In conclusion, Avengers: Endgame is a great movie of superheroes and that closes with a flourish all the movies of the Avengers. The film gives moments of glory to many of their characters and gives a worthy conclusion to others. A film that, along with its prequel Infinity War, is to be seen again and again and that it will also earn the right to be immovable within a collection of an authentic movie buff, especially if it is a fan of superhero movies. So while I give this movie 4 out of 5 Gems of Infinity. A film that will undoubtedly mark a before and after in superhero movies.

Greetings

Rankakiu

P.S. Motherfu... They killed Black Widow, my favorite character! How dare they!? It is something that I will not overcome in years XD.