|
Comrade Fakename posted:Obviously the MCU has significantly broken this rule now with the Snap, a traumatic event that effected everyone on the planet at once. But while those effects have been explored somewhat, they're already receding into the past and "normality" is reasserting. Other than a handful of throwaway mentions and some signs on walls, the Snap is irrelevant in Shang-Chi. This is pretty dangerous for the MCU as it means that stakes feel increasingly unreal - it's moving towards to tone of the comics where nothing is permanent, colossal disasters happen all the time, characters can die and come back with no problems, and no one can actually say for sure if any past event actually "really happened". People wonder all the time when the MCU bubble will burst and I'd say it's when this stuff overwhelms it and people lose interest. I am not sure how much it ultimately matters. The specific popularity of specific comics ebb and flow over time, but superman has been dying and undying since your great grandparents were kids. Like all the famous exasperated "not a dream, not a hoax" covers are over 60 years old now. And they do show that the public did start to get annoyed with overuse, it also shows that 60 years later "superman" and 'his girlfriend lois lane" are still major cultural icons.  I think comics specifically do burn out people's taste for that stuff, but when that happens comics just pump out new characters for a while, then circle back around. People do like the stories always vaguely taking place in their modern day more than they entirely like it being a 100 year long sci-fi speculation thing. So they do always snap back, and people do always get annoyed, but decades later it hardly sinks the characters in any long term way.
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2021 15:28
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 04:15 |
|
|
It's fine for allegories to have limits. If you read some fable about a fox trying to trick a rabbit and then learning a lesson about fairness or something. You are supposed to understand the lesson about fairness, not dig into some weird rabbithole of trying to figure the moral dimensions of a prey animal and a predator being friends. Like yeah tons of x-men doesn't make sense in a tactical realism way, but that is how allegory works, no one is reading it and going "I'm so confused! I don't get this!", they understand that some parts are a standin for real things and some parts are just part of the fictional narrative.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2021 12:47
|
|
|
Kavros posted:the X-Men as parable (especially for minority rights and struggles) only works well if the X-Men are doing their thing, alone, in their own universe where the sole focus is the emergence of mutancy and the resulting reactionary societal backlash and crackdowns that result from it. Tying it into the same comic book universe where superheroes and aliens and psychic wizards and poo poo have been having their superpower duels for as long as everyone's been alive just invalidates the narrative setting. Like, mutants would appear and people would just be like "this is supposed to be news? our city gets protected from giant rhino-men and vampires and extraterrestrial symbiotes that wear themselves on their hosts by some dude who has psycho spider powers lmao" and you're not going to have a gainly scenario play out where the authorities are all like "false alarm fellas, this hulk guy, not a mutant, actually just some gamma ray mutation he had this one time, completely different thing, withdraw the Sentinels, he's perfectly ok to continue" like if he was superpowered because of a natural gene expression instead, whambo bambo suddenly its very different. I feel like you need to look up how stupid real world bigotry is, the list of who is or isn’t socially okay is a hilariously complex and thin lined web. Like which near identical religions are or are not socially acceptable to various groups would be nearly unexplainable to someone out of the society.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2021 03:52
|
|
|
The best real world racism is Japanese burakumin where it is based on your ancestors jobs so the only way you can know who to be racist against is look in books they kept at town hall and people to this day are caught illegally looking up peoples status or French cagots where literally no one on earth has any idea what a cagot even is and have no identifying features but people were brutally racist against for centuries without being able to articulate why some towns were cagot towns. The idea that one type of hero would be lauded and one hated on arbitrary lines is no sillier than the different treatment vin desiel and Obama get (both half black)
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2021 04:41
|
|
|
fool of sound posted:Granted, this isn't particularly supposed to apply to All Might himself, as such. His flaw is that he created the whole lazy rock star hero situation by basically taking on every serious threat himself and never really leading, training, or delegating to anyone else until he literally was unable to keep it up, and by then the rot had set in. seems like you need to watch "big man japan"
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2021 15:49
|
|
|
I feel like the main thing with stranger in a strange land is that it was written in 1950 something and released in 1961. The questions it is asking about religion and morals are dumb now, but were much much much more pointed to the intended audience. Like it's really written to an audience of guys who had never met a non christian or a foreigner and thought of spaghetti as exotic food. Like it would raddle the coconut of some 1950s square to think 'woah, what if some guy came to town called my beliefs stupid and then his weird beliefs that are the opposite of mine were the right ones! I'm the one that is supposed to do that! everyone loves when I do that! right.... right?" in a way that it's not gonna shake up the worldview of a 2021 internet guy that has met a black person before or knows of muslims as more than legends. Like it's not really that anything smith thinks is REALLY supposed to be stuff you agree with in the real world. You are just supposed to accept it as "these guys have a totally different worldview that is nothing like ours, in fact things we think are bad they think are great." and it's the difference that is important more than the details of it. Like it's not a pro eating dead bodies book. It's a pro "well, we just assume our morals are all right because we all agree with them, what would happen if we met a guy who said different and we couldn't just dismiss him"
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2021 16:13
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:Ok but why did the MC have 3 buxom secretaries who's job it was to hang out at the pool all day and memorize everything he says. Why was that such a vital component of the story that he spent like a quarter of the book justifying their existence and their "skills". Because the counterpoint was a future where the conservative, puritanical church had even more control over american society than it did in real 1950s. Like he was a horny author and wrote horny stuff, but "what if sex is good actually?" was way more of a shakeup idea for mainstream society pre 1960s than it's gonna be for a guy reading it half a century later. The idea an alien would be like "I like having sex! actually my religion says having sex with people is good and cool! even outside of marriage! I don't even know I'm not supposed to have sex with all these babes! seems fine to me and I don't know why you are so hung up on it!" If you wrote it now you'd write him as casually pansexual and expressing confusion that everyone is so mad his girlfriend has a penis and him explaining his boyfriend also has a penis and having no idea why people are yelling at him about it. But it was a book released in 1961 and written before, so hippy free love was the topic that still was like "woah, what? sex outside marriage!?!? OPENLY!? not as a shameful scandal!?!??!"
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2021 18:10
|
|
|
Dune was released as a serialized story in analog and galaxy magazine. The first two books are just packaging of a continuous work. Dune being book 1,2 and 3, and messiah being 4 and 5. The third book is also a continuation of the story and a direct sequel, but the first two books are literally just arbitrary divisions of a single work.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2021 17:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 04:15 |
|
|
In the actual movie thanos' plan wasn't even necessarily to destroy half of life. His thing was on his own dying world saying "hey if we don't kill half of people the world will end, we need to have a fair lottery to determine" and then the good guys say "nah, lets not" and then everyone dying. He then found a second world with the same issue (gammora's world) and did it then everything on that planet was great and it became a paradise. His original plan with the stones was to be that sort of hated necessary evil, cruel but fair, a force of nature balancing things. It shrunk down to flat "kill half of everyone" because he got stabbed by the avengers and lost so he enacted the claim he had said earlier that with the stones he could have saved his planet "with the snap of a finger". If he was let to enact his whole plan it would have been decisions LIKE that, not just literally that one only. Which is actually a fairly interesting trolly problem sort of character. He was a savior willing to sacrifice to be the most hated man alive. (but the story got to side step it as a question because he did a "kamikaze move" when defeated and only did a much more overtly pointless and evil simplified section of the plan of "be a force of balance")
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2021 15:30
|
|