I don't know if Deadpool getting limbs chopped off and treating it like a minor inconvenience has permanently broken people's understanding of healing factors, but apparently this needs saying:

Healing quickly and not feeling pain are two completely different abilities.

This is mostly inspired by some of the INCREDIBLY stupid and bad faith discourse around Insomniac's Wolverine, particularly people questioning why Wolverine would bother wearing armour when he can just heal from injuries... maybe because getting shot, stabbed, burned, slashed or having chunks ripped out of you still fucking hurts?

A healing factor means your body repairs the damage. It doesn't automatically give you anaesthesia. Unless the specific version of the character is established to have reduced pain perception, they're still experiencing the injury in the first place. Wolverine being able to survive something doesn't mean he'd particularly enjoy experiencing it. Armour still prevents damage, reduces pain, keeps him functional during a fight and means his healing factor has less work to do.

Regeneration is not invulnerability, and it definitely isn't a permanent morphine drip. I genuinely don't know why this distinction seems so difficult...

Let me dare say something positive about this game: Spider-Man 2 is comfortably my favourite of Insomniac's three Spider-Man games. I still think the first game probably has the tightest overall story. Spider-Man 2's final act needed more room, Venom could have used more time, and Miles could have been tied into the central plot a little more consistently. But I also think there's a genuinely good Spider-Man story here, and one that has more going on thematically than it's sometimes given credit for.

A lot of it comes down to change: Peter learning that responsibility doesn't mean destroying himself, Miles learning that moving on doesn't require forgiveness, former villains trying to become something better, Harry desperately trying to reclaim the life he's losing, and Kraven being someone who actively refuses to become anything other than what he has always been.

Peter's problem isn't that the symbiote suddenly makes him an asshole

The black suit section is probably my favourite part of the story because I don't think the symbiote invents Peter's problems. It amplifies ones that have been sitting there for years.

This version of Peter has spent most of his adult life responding to every setback by taking more responsibility onto himself. He loses people, struggles financially, and repeatedly sacrifices his career and relationships because Spider-Man always has to come first. This game starts with him losing his teaching job almost immediately. He's struggling to keep May's house. He wants some kind of future with MJ, but there's always another emergency.

Then Harry comes back and, briefly, Peter gets something he almost never gets: hope. His best friend is healthy, the Emily-May Foundation gives him meaningful work, and Harry can even help him as Spider-Man. Then that starts falling apart too. So when Peter gets the symbiote and suddenly becomes stronger than he's ever been, I don't think his attachment to it is just "power feels good." The more interesting thought underneath it is:

Maybe now I can finally be enough.

Peter keeps insisting that the suit makes him a "better Spider-Man," and I think that wording matters. His self-worth has become tied to how much he can personally protect. If he's stronger, maybe nobody else has to die. Maybe he won't fail Harry. Maybe he won't fail the city. Maybe all the damage to Peter Parker's life is worth it if Spider-Man becomes powerful enough. The symbiote takes that already unhealthy sense of responsibility and removes the restraint.

"Be Greater. Together." actually sums up Peter's arc pretty well

That's also why the tagline works for me as more than marketing.

Be Greater. Together.

Peter's problem is that he treats responsibility as something he has to carry personally, and the game doesn't resolve that by making him even stronger. It resolves it by making him accept help. Miles helps him remove the symbiote. MJ refuses to simply watch him destroy himself. Miles increasingly proves that New York doesn't collapse the second Peter isn't there. By the ending, Peter can finally trust another Spider-Man enough to spend some time actually being Peter Parker.

I've seen that ending interpreted as Peter being weakened or pushed aside for Miles, but I read it almost completely the opposite way. Peter learning that he doesn't need to do everything himself is growth. If his entire arc ended with "Peter learns he needs to sacrifice even more of his life," what exactly would he have learned? Responsibility doesn't have to mean martyrdom.

Peter and Harry are the emotional centre, and I think they work

I really like Peter and Harry's relationship because the game actually lets Harry be Peter's friend before turning everything into tragedy. Coney Island is important for that. Harry gets to be happy. Peter gets his best friend back. They act like people who have known each other for years. Harry isn't secretly evil, jealous or scheming from the beginning. He genuinely wants to use his second chance to do something worthwhile. Even Harry becoming a hero alongside Peter is played sincerely. He's healthy again, helping people, working towards "healing the world" and doing it with his best friend.

That's why his deterioration works for me. Harry isn't simply angry because Peter "stole his alien." He's dying again while watching the thing that kept him alive remain attached to Peter, who is becoming increasingly convinced that he needs it. Peter's fear of not being strong enough crashes directly into Harry's fear of losing his life again. That gives their conflict a genuine tragedy that I think gets overlooked when it's reduced to "Harry gets jealous and becomes Venom."

Kraven is a great villain precisely because he refuses to change

Kraven is also probably my favourite villain in the game. His motivation isn't complicated: he's dying, refuses to accept an ordinary death, and wants something worthy to kill him but the game commits so hard to that idea that he becomes genuinely intimidating. What I particularly like is how he enters a world where several of Spider-Man's villains are trying to move beyond who they used to be and simply does not care. Tombstone has a normal job and seems genuinely happy to have left his criminal life behind. Mysterio is attempting to rebuild himself. Martin Li is confronting the harm he's caused. Sandman's story is centred much more around Flint as a frightened father than as another boss waiting to fight Spider-Man. Kraven reduces all of these people back down to what they once were: prey.

There's something fittingly ugly about that. Other characters are asking whether people can change. Kraven isn't interested in change at all. He only cares about whether someone can still give him the violence he wants. That also makes him a perfect villain for the symbiote portion. Kraven spends the story searching for something violent enough to kill him while Peter is becoming increasingly convinced that being stronger, angrier and more brutal makes him a better hero. Their trajectories meet in that fight. Peter comes frighteningly close to giving Kraven exactly what he wants. Then Venom actually does...

The game has a surprisingly good recurring theme about former villains

This is one of the things I like most about SM 2: its rogues gallery isn't frozen in place. Tombstone isn't inevitably destined to become Tombstone again because comics say so. Quentin Beck's past means people have good reason not to trust him, but that doesn't automatically mean his attempt to reform is fake. Martin Li wants to atone even though nothing he does can undo Jefferson Davis' death and all the other people he's killed. The game keeps returning to the idea that people can become better without pretending their past stops mattering and Li is where I think this theme works best.

Miles and Martin Li is one of my favourite parts of the story

Miles has every reason to hate Li. Li murdered his father and permanently changed his family. What I really appreciate is that the game doesn't force Miles to forgive him just to demonstrate that Miles is a good person.

When Miles tells him:

"I won't forgive you. It's just not in me anymore."

that's probably my favourite Miles moment across these games. He doesn't absolve Li. He doesn't decide that Li's good deeds have somehow cancelled out what happened. He doesn't owe Li reconciliation just because Li genuinely regrets his actions. He simply stops wanting hatred to control him. I think that's a much more mature distinction than a lot of redemption stories make. Someone can sincerely change and deserve the chance to become better without being entitled to forgiveness from the people they hurt.

Likewise, Miles doesn't need to remain consumed by anger forever for his father's death to continue mattering. That also makes him a good counterpart to Peter. Miles learns how to carry pain without allowing it to define him, while Peter spends much of the game letting his own anger, frustration and fear take control so when Miles is the one trying to pull Peter back from the symbiote, it fits.

"When you help someone, you help everyone."

One of the things Insomniac consistently gets right about Spider-Man is that the character shouldn't only matter when the world is ending. Some of my favourite missions in Spider-Man 2 are tiny. Helping Howard release his pigeons while gradually understanding what he's saying goodbye to. Helping Grandpa Earl. Experiencing part of the city through Hailey. Peter returning to the Emily-May Foundation experiments. None of this is huge superhero spectacle, and that's exactly why it matters.

May's line from the first game sums it up:

"When you help someone, you help everyone."

Spider-Man shouldn't only care when millions of lives are at stake. One person needing help is enough. The game can go from Peter and Miles fighting a skyscraper-sized Sandman to Spider-Man helping one elderly man, and both feel completely appropriate and I think that lesson ultimately applies to Peter himself. May never told him that he personally has to save everybody. Helping others creates people who help others in turn. Peter is allowed to be one of the people being helped.

Again: Be Greater. Together.

I like Venom's direction, I just wish the game gave him more time

My biggest narrative problem is still the final act. Conceptually, I actually like what Insomniac does with Venom. Harry and the symbiote corrupting "heal the world" works because that phrase originally represents something genuinely good. Harry and Peter want to improve people's lives through the Emily-May Foundation.

Venom takes that idea and removes consent from it. Harry wants to heal the world. Venom decides the easiest way to do that is to make the entire world like him. That's a pretty fitting corruption of Harry's original dream. My issue is pacing. Once Venom properly arrives, the story races towards the symbiote apocalypse. I would have loved another couple of missions with Harry as Venom before everything escalated, especially more time between Harry, Peter and MJ.

So I don't really come away thinking "this concept didn't work." I come away thinking "I wish you'd given this another hour or two."

And honestly, it's also just incredibly fun

Obviously CharacterRant isn't really the place for a giant mechanical review, but the gameplay is still a massive part of why this is my favourite of the three.

Traversal is leagues better for me. Faster swinging, web wings, the slingshot and the extra movement mechanics make crossing New York enjoyable enough that I barely want to fast travel.

Peter and Miles feel more distinct in combat, the symbiote powers are exactly the kind of ridiculous power fantasy I wanted, and the bosses are a major improvement. Sandman, Lizard, Kraven, Mister Negative, Peter and Venom give the game the kind of huge superhero fights I wanted more of from the first game and sometimes there isn't some deeper thematic argument needed. Playing as Venom and smashing through Oscorp is fucking cool.

It's flawed, but there's a lot here that I genuinely love

Spider-Man 2 isn't perfect. The third act needed more breathing room. Miles could have been tied into the main story more consistently. Some of the side material feels more like setup for the future than a complete story here but I think it gets far more right than wrong.

Peter learns that responsibility doesn't require destroying his own life. Miles learns that moving on doesn't require forgiving someone who hurt him. Li demonstrates that redemption isn't something you do in exchange for being absolved. Tombstone and Mysterio show that villains don't have to remain trapped in the same role forever. Kraven serves as the opposite: somebody so committed to what he is that he'd rather die than become anything else. Harry's sincere desire to "heal the world" becomes monstrous when helping people stops involving what they actually want and through all of that, the game still remembers the most basic part of Spider-Man: helping one person matters.

May said:

"When you help someone, you help everyone."

And I think SM2 adds another piece to that idea. You also have to let other people help you. For all its flaws, that's a Spider-Man story I really like.

TL;DR: Insomniacs Spider-Man 2 is flawed, especially in how rushed the final act feels, but it’s still my favourite Insomniac Spider-Man game. I think Peter’s symbiote arc, Harry’s tragedy, Kraven’s refusal to change, Miles and Li’s approach to forgiveness, and the game’s broader themes of redemption and accepting help all work really well. Add in much better traversal, combat, bosses and spectacle, and for me it’s a very easy 9/10.

God one of the most obnoxious forms of media discourse online is people confusing “I grew up with this” with “therefore this should continue being made specifically for me until I die.” NO. Media does not have to grow up with you.

A franchise does not automatically acquire a new target demographic every time its existing audience has a birthday. You turning 30 does not mean the thing you loved at 12 now has an obligation to become darker, more complicated, more violent, more adult, more nostalgic, or more specifically tailored to the tastes you developed over the following 18 years and holy shit is gaming discourse bad about this.

Gaming Reddit in particular sometimes feels like a fucking mausoleum. Every showcase, every publisher announcement, every new IP, every studio revealing what it actually wants to make inevitably summons people asking:

Where's Sly Cooper? Where's Jak and Daxter? Where's Resistance? Where's Killzone? Where's SOCOM? Where's Banjo? Where's F-Zero? Where's Golden Sun? Where's whatever other game I played between the ages of 9 and 17? and to be clear: wanting those games back is completely fine. I want old things back too. There are dead franchises I'd buy tomorrow. The entitlement starts when "I'd love another one" becomes "this company is stupid/out of touch/doesn't understand gamers because it is making things current audiences care about instead of resurrecting the exact IP catalogue I remember from 2004."

Some of these franchises were successful. Some were genuinely great. Some absolutely deserved better and some have been retroactively promoted by nostalgia from "pretty well-liked mid-tier franchise" to "sacred pillar of the medium whose disappearance represents everything wrong with modern gaming."

You would think some of these games had the cultural footprint of fucking GTA from the way people talk about them now but they didn't. A franchise becoming disproportionately beloved by the people who remember it twenty years later does not mean there is secretly an enormous present-day mass market begging for a $150 million revival. A loud concentration of thirty- and forty-somethings on gaming forums is not the same thing as the entire gaming audience and more importantly: new audiences are allowed to get things instead.

The people who grew up with the PS1, PS2, Xbox, GameCube and early HD generations got an absolutely ridiculous number of games made for them. Entire genres rose, fell, mutated and were replaced while that generation was growing up. Why exactly should the industry now freeze there?

Why should someone who is 14 today receive endless revivals of things a 38-year-old remembers fondly instead of getting their own games, characters, genres and franchises to become nostalgic about twenty years from now? This is the part of nostalgia discourse that drives me insane. People talk about younger audiences like they're occupying space that rightfully belongs to them. You don't own shit. You aged out of being the centre of the culture. That is normal.

Pokémon does not owe you an increasingly adult mainline series because you played Pokémon Red as a child. The new eight-year-old discovering Pokémon is not some annoying newcomer invading your franchise. From the perspective of what Pokémon has always been trying to do, you are the returning adult.

Battle shonen does not owe you a gradual transformation into seinen because you went from 14 to 34. If you're complaining that media primarily aimed at teenagers still contains teenage melodrama, simple moral ideas or youthful protagonists decades after you entered the audience, there is an absolutely enormous amount of media made for adults sitting right fucking there.

Superhero stories do not have to permanently reconstruct themselves around whichever interpretation happened to be definitive when you were a teenager. Children's animation does not need to become adult animation because its 2000s fanbase can now qualify for a mortgage.

And before someone deliberately misunderstands the point: none of this means you can't enjoy media aimed younger than you. Enjoy whatever the fuck you want. It also doesn't mean franchises can't mature. Sometimes aging characters alongside their audience produces something fantastic. Sometimes an older IP benefits massively from reinterpreting itself for people who grew up with it but there is a massive difference between saying "this could be interesting" and behaving as though "this is what they owe me." They owe you NOTHING.

Nor am I saying old media should disappear. Preservation is important. Backwards compatibility is good. Ports, remasters and accessible archives are good. Companies letting huge portions of gaming history become practically inaccessible is worth criticising but preservation is not the same thing as demanding infinite sequels. You can preserve Jak and Daxter without insisting Naughty Dog spend the rest of human civilisation making Jak 9. You can love Killzone without treating Guerrilla moving onto another creative project as some historic act of betrayal. You can adore an old franchise while accepting that its moment as an active franchise may simply be over.

What makes this particularly funny is that every generation eventually does exactly this. Right now we are watching the generation raised on late-'90s and 2000s media reach the age where its childhood nostalgia has enormous cultural and purchasing power, so suddenly everything from that period is "underrated," "forgotten," "deserving of a remake," "what gaming used to be," or evidence that "developers understood fun back then."

Give it another fifteen or twenty years and Gen Z will probably be doing the exact same annoying shit about the media of the 2010s and 2020s while some kid wonders why forty-year-olds won't shut the fuck up about Minecraft, Fortnite, Elden Ring and whatever else survives as their generational sacred cow because people have an incredible tendency to mistake the period when they were discovering culture for the period when culture was objectively at its best.

It wasn't. You were just young. Your memories are valuable. Your attachment to those games, shows, films and characters is real. Nobody has to take that away from you but your nostalgia is not a creative mandate. At some point, "this isn't made for me anymore" is not necessarily an indictment of the thing but just an observation. Maybe it isn't made for you anymore. Maybe something else is. Go find it.

TL;DR: Wanting an old IP back is fine. Continuing to enjoy childhood media is fine. Acting like an entire medium or franchise owes your generation permanent priority because you happened to grow up with it is not. Your childhood mattered to you. It is not an industry roadmap.

BND has convinced me that Jon Bernthal’s Punisher just works better as a supporting character than as the centre of his own story. His two best appearances are still Daredevil Season 2 and now Brand New Day, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that both place him inside another hero’s story. I haven't seen Born Again but I imagine its the same there as well.

Bernthal is fantastic at making Frank intense, wounded and completely certain of himself but his interpretation is also deeply filtered through his own values because he places enormous emphasis on Frank as a grieving father, a soldier and a fundamentally decent man who has been destroyed by trauma and yes that humanity is part of why the performance works, but I think it becomes limiting when Frank is the protagonist.

A solo Punisher story has to keep us invested in him for a while, so it inevitably starts softening him. His victims become sufficiently monstrous, his violence becomes increasingly defensible, and the story repeatedly returns to his family, his trauma and whether he can rediscover some honourable purpose so instead of being a deeply disturbing man who has made punishment his entire identity, he can start feeling like a noble veteran whom the world has tragically forced to kill people and I think that problem largely disappears when Frank is a supporting character.

In Daredevil Season 2, the story does not need to prove that Frank is secretly right or morally redeemable. He exists to challenge Matt. He forces Matt to defend his no-killing rule, exposes the compromises in Matt’s own vigilantism and represents the endpoint Matt refuses to reach. Brand New Day uses him similarly with Peter. Frank works as a brutal counterweight to Spider-Man’s empathy and restraint a possible future for a lonely, angry Peter who begins convincing himself that violence is the only thing criminals understand.

Frank does not need to carry the moral centre of either story. He can be compelling, sympathetic, frightening and completely wrong at the same time which is where Bernthal’s interpretation works best. His obvious compassion for Frank prevents him from becoming a one-note psychopath, while characters like Matt and Peter stop that compassion from turning into complete moral validation. They can understand his pain without allowing his worldview to dominate the story.

To be clear this is not me saying Bernthal is incapable of leading. His performance was easily strong enough to carry The Punisher series. I just think this particular version of Frank is more effective in concentrated doses. Let him enter another hero’s story, destabilise their worldview, force them to defend their principles and then leave behind whatever damage he caused. Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is at his best when he is not the hero of the story but when he is someone else’s problem to either solve, evade or tolerate.

Yeah, I'm going to defend this take and no, I don't mean that your protagonist has to be the coolest, funniest, strongest or even my favourite character in the story. One side character being more interesting than the protagonist means absolutely nothing. Sometimes a character is fascinating specifically because they're used sparingly, mysterious, or observed from the outside. I'm talking about when it becomes a pattern.

When the protagonist is surrounded by characters with more interesting motivations, more complicated relationships, stronger personalities, more compelling conflicts and more meaningful connections to the world, eventually I think it's fair to ask a pretty brutal question:

Why am I following this person instead of one of them?

I've never really bought the stock response that "the protagonist is just supposed to be the audience POV" because that's still a writing choice. A POV character isn't literally a camera strapped to somebody's chest. Their perspective is supposed to change how we experience the story.

Watson is nowhere near as extraordinary as Sherlock Holmes, but Watson isn't pointless because he's "the normal guy." His admiration, frustration, morality and inability to completely understand Holmes are part of how Holmes is presented to us. Remove Watson's particular perspective and you change Sherlock Holmes. Nick Carraway doesn't need to be more flamboyant than Gatsby because the entire point is that we're seeing Gatsby through Nick's fascination and eventual disillusionment.

Being less extraordinary is not the same thing as being less interesting and that's the distinction I think gets blurred whenever this criticism comes up. Take The Blacklist. Elizabeth Keen is ostensibly our entry point into this world, but Raymond Reddington has the more distinctive personality, the enormous history, the relationships throughout the criminal world, the mysterious motivations, the unusual morality and generally far more agency in deciding where the story goes. He doesn't merely "steal scenes." The narrative constantly generates interesting material simply by asking what Reddington wants, knows or has done. At some point calling Elizabeth the necessary relatable POV starts feeling less like an explanation and more like an excuse for why we're following the least interesting person in the room.

I think JJK occasionally runs into a similar problem with Yuji. Gojo and Geto have this enormous shared history and ideological split. Megumi's identity is tangled up with the Zenin clan and Sukuna's interest in him. Sukuna has his own mythology and relationship to the jujutsu world. Maki has the Zenin conflict. Yuta has his own strange position within jujutsu society. Yuji absolutely has important thematic material of his own, especially around death, guilt and what constitutes a "proper death." I'm not saying he's literally irrelevant but there are long stretches where the world seems to have substantially more history with everyone around Yuji than it does with Yuji himself and when people respond to that kind of criticism with "that's fine, protagonists can be simple," I think they're answering a different complaint.

Of course protagonists can be simple.

Tanjiro is simple.

Frodo isn't exactly surrounded by characters less colourful than him.

Mob spends much of Mob Psycho 100 actively trying to be ordinary.

None of them feel like empty space in their own stories.

A protagonist can be quiet, straightforward, reactive, ordinary or deliberately uncharismatic while still possessing a perspective, internal conflict or relationship with the central premise that makes following them specifically worthwhile.

That's what I mean by choosing the wrong protagonist.

Not:

"This side character is cooler, make him the MC."

But:

"The most interesting things in this story consistently seem to happen when the protagonist isn't involved" which is different and I don't think "side characters have more freedom because they don't have to carry the story" is much of a defence either by the way. If anything, that's backwards. The protagonist is the character who gets the most narrative resources.They get the screentime. The internality. The development. The relationships. The major decisions. The opportunity to change.

If writers can make somebody fascinating with twenty minutes of screentime but struggle to make the person we've followed for fifty episodes equally compelling, I'm not sure why the amount of attention given to the protagonist is supposed to excuse that. Obviously you shouldn't automatically promote whichever side character the internet thinks is coolest. Some characters would become substantially less interesting if we lived inside their head. Mystery matters. Distance matters. Scarcity matters. Hannibal Lecter doesn't become a better character simply because you give him 80% of the movie.

But again: one character outshining the protagonist isn't the problem.

It's when you finish a story and realise the protagonist was basically standing at the intersection of several much more interesting people's stories. At that point I think "they're the relatable POV character" can become a polite way of saying:

the writer chose the least interesting person available and gave them the most screentime.

And yes, I think that's a writing flaw.

TL;DR: One side character being more interesting than the protagonist is normal. But if most of the cast consistently has stronger motivations, relationships, conflicts, and connections to the world, then “the protagonist is just the relatable POV” stops being a good excuse. A POV character still needs to make following their perspective worthwhile. If the most interesting parts of the story routinely happen around the protagonist rather than because of them, you may have simply chosen the wrong protagonist.

Man one of the most irritating habits in entertainment discourse has got to be when someone starts with a reasonable criticism, swaps it for a much dumber ideological claim, then runs back to the reasonable one when challenged.

“I think this character looks worse” becomes “Western developers are deliberately making women ugly because feminism/DEI/the left hates attractive women.” Then when you ask them to prove that second claim, suddenly it’s: “So I’m not allowed to think she’s ugly?” Nobody said that. Stop pretending those are the same argument. That leap is the problem. “I don’t like this design” does not prove “developers are ideologically trying to uglify women.”

The Spider-Man 2 MJ discourse comes to mind. Thinking MJ looks worse than she did in the first game is completely fair. Claiming an Insomniac writer secretly replaced MJ’s face with her own as some feminist self-insert was just false. Stephanie Tyler Jones was still the face model, and the employee people blamed had never even been facially scanned but once that story was debunked, the retreat was predictable: “Why can’t people admit MJ is ugly?”

Again, nobody was arguing with that part.

You see the same thing elsewhere. “I prefer Steve Rogers as Captain America” is an opinion. “Sam Wilson is badly written” is criticism. “Marvel race-swapped Steve because of DEI” is simply an inaccurate description of what happened. Sam is a separate character who became Captain America in the comics before the MCU adapted it. That’s the bait-and-switch.

A character being ugly to you does not prove an industry conspiracy to uglify women. A minority character being badly written does not prove diversity caused the bad writing. A progressive game failing does not automatically prove the politics caused the failure. If you want to make the bigger claim, make it and defend it. Just stop hiding behind the smaller, safer criticism every time someone asks you for evidence.

Circlejerk subreddits increasingly strike me as remnants of an older internet culture built around irony, detachment and the assumption that taking anything seriously was inherently embarrassing and yes that culture works reasonably well when everyone understands the joke but the problem is that large communities cannot preserve that shared context indefinitely. New users arrive, the original targets become less important, and the subreddit gradually develops genuine opinions, taboos and orthodoxies of its own.

Yet it retains the old language of “nothing here is serious” which I hate mainly because it creates an unusually obnoxious form of groupthink. A subreddit can spend years mocking the same opinions and rewarding the same counter-opinions, but whenever anyone challenges the underlying consensus, the defence is simply that it is “just a circlejerk.” The result is a community that clearly takes something seriously while refusing to admit that it does.

This also explains why “look at this obviously insane person” so often deteriorates into “look at this person who disagrees with us.” Once the original joke has exhausted itself, maintaining the community becomes more important than maintaining the distinction between stupidity and heterodoxy.

Circlejerk subs therefore feel like fossils of a period of internet culture where irony was treated as insulation from sincerity. The irony is that many of them have become extremely rigid communities while still imagining themselves as detached observers laughing at everyone else's groupthink.

Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes has THE superior Banner/Hulk dynamic, and it is the direction the MCU either should have taken years ago or should still adopt in the future. That show understood that Hulk can be intelligent, articulate and capable of functioning as an Avenger without simply becoming Bruce Banner in a green body. He remains blunt, aggressive and eager to solve problems physically, but he can communicate, make decisions and form relationships (the funny hawkeye stuff)

Banner still matters too of course. He and Hulk remain separate individuals who can advise, challenge and disagree with each other. Neither needs to be erased for the character to function. The MCU’s approach is just way way messier. Bruce initially has little control over his transformations, I think the Avengers implies he has begun mastering them, Ragnarok establishes Hulk as an independent personality, and then Endgame skips their entire reconciliation and calls the result a merger, even though Smart Hulk is presented almost entirely as Banner in Hulk’s body while the independent Hulk personality established in Ragnarok seemingly disappears.

The MCU keeps bouncing between two bad extremes: either Bruce has no agency because Hulk takes over against his will, or Hulk has no agency because Bruce takes over completely. I think The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes dynamic offers the obvious and superior middle ground. Banner and Hulk should accept that they need each other and argue about how to be heroes rather than which one gets to exist.

Banner might favour planning and restraint. Hulk might believe Banner hesitates when decisive action is needed. They can disagree about violence, collateral damage and when each of them should take control while still pursuing the same goal. I think we can all agree that is far more interesting than repeating the same “Banner wants to cure himself and Hulk refuses to disappear” conflict forever.

Let them become reluctant partners. Let them establish their own rules. Let both of them retain agency and develop without one personality consuming the other. I think at this point, I would rather watch Banner and Hulk argue about what to eat for dinner than sit through another story about them trying to get rid of each other because lord almighty thats gotten so old now.

I loved BND, but it also firmly reminded me that I have never really bought Tom Holland’s supporting cast.

The distinction I keep coming back to is this: I care that Peter has lost everyone, but I’m much less invested in the individual people and relationships the films are asking me to mourn: MJ, Ned and Aunt May.

BND understands the basic emotional power of loneliness extremely well. Peter lives alone, nobody remembers him, and he has to watch people he once loved continue with lives that no longer include him. That is an inherently painful concept, and Tom Holland sells it. I feel for Peter because being completely forgotten and isolated is horrifying.

But most of that emotion comes from the universal idea of loneliness rather than any particularly strong attachment I have to this version of MJ or Ned. The film successfully creates the feeling of an empty life. I’m just not convinced it creates an MJ-shaped, Ned-shaped or even Aunt May-shaped hole within it.

MJ still barely exists outside Peter

Zendaya’s MJ has now appeared in four Spider-Man films, and I still don’t feel like I know her particularly well. We know her sense of humour. We know that she is observant, cynical and politically aware. We know how she behaves around Peter and Ned. But those are traits and mannerisms, not necessarily a fully developed inner life.

What is her relationship with her family? What was her home life like? What does she genuinely want from adulthood? What scares her outside the immediate dangers created by Peter being Spider-Man? Who is she when Peter is not standing in the room?

Even BND gives her a new boyfriend but barely develops that relationship. He largely exists so Peter can see that she has moved on and spiral further. We don’t learn much about how MJ feels about him, what their relationship is like, why she chose him or what he means to her. Once he has served his function in Peter’s story, he practically disappears.

That is the broader problem with this MJ. Her life frequently feels as though it only becomes real when Peter is present to observe it.

There is obviously chemistry between Tom Holland and Zendaya, and both are strong enough actors to communicate a great deal through looks and body language. But the films have relied on that chemistry to do work the writing should also be doing.

I’m not claiming Marvel literally constructed the relationship around their real-life romance. The issue is that the movies often feel as though they expect the audience’s affection for Tom and Zendaya together to fill in the gaps between Peter and MJ. Their performances create the impression of emotional history, but the scripts rarely provide enough of that history themselves.

Raimi’s MJ was already a person after one film

Sam Raimi’s MJ is not a perfectly written character. There are plenty of valid criticisms of her, particularly as that trilogy continues. But by the end of SM1, I understand her as a person.

We know about her abusive father and unhappy home life. We know she wants to become an actress. We see her working after graduating. We understand her attraction to status and popularity, as well as the insecurity beneath it. We see distinct relationships between her and Flash, Harry, Norman, Aunt May, Peter and Spider-Man.

Those relationships reveal different sides of her. She does not cease to exist whenever Peter leaves the scene. SM1 actually dramatises why MJ might matter to Peter and why Peter might matter to her. Their relationship is messy and melodramatic, but it feels like a relationship between two specific people.

With the MCU version, Peter is suddenly interested in MJ at the beginning of FFH, and the films largely ask us to accept the depth of their romance from there. We see that they are cute together, but we don’t get nearly enough of the process through which their connection supposedly became the defining relationship of Peter’s life.

Now BND wants their separation to carry much of the film’s emotional weight. Zendaya and Holland perform the hell out of it, but I still feel like the movie is asking me to mourn a relationship the previous films never completely built.

Ned has a similar problem

Ned is likeable and occasionally funny, but he has primarily existed as Peter’s comic sidekick.

What does he want beyond helping Peter, being his best friend and making jokes? What makes this particular friendship irreplaceable rather than simply useful and affectionate? How has knowing Peter changed Ned, and how has knowing Ned changed Peter?

There is genuine affection between them, but not much interiority. That is particularly noticeable in BND because the movie wants Peter’s separation from Ned to feel devastating. Yet Ned often feels less like an irreplaceable individual Peter has lost and more like a representation of the general concept of having a best friend.

The films have established that Peter needs companionship. They have done much less to establish why nobody other than Ned could provide it.

It doesn’t help that I didn’t find him especially funny in this film either. When comedy has always been one of a character’s primary functions, weakening that comedy reveals how little else the character has been given.

Aunt May’s death had the same problem

This is also why Aunt May’s death in NWH never completely worked for me.

The scene is obviously supposed to be foundational. May gives Peter the great-power-and-great-responsibility lesson, dies because of Peter’s decision to help the villains and becomes the moral loss that defines the Spider-Man he will be going forward. But the previous films had not done enough to establish May as Peter’s central moral influence.

Marisa Tomei was charming in the role, but May was often used for jokes about her attractiveness, Peter hiding his identity and Happy’s romantic interest in her. Then NWH suddenly needed her to become this Peter’s equivalent of Uncle Ben and carry one of the most significant emotional moments in his entire story.

It felt less like the culmination of her established character arc and more like the screenplay assigning her enormous symbolic importance shortly before killing her.

Compare that with Insomniac’s Aunt May. Her work at FEAST, her relationship with Martin Li, her knowledge of Peter’s identity and her insistence on continuing to help during the crisis all establish her values throughout the game.

When she dies, it hurts because we understand exactly who Peter is losing. She isn’t important merely because she occupies the Aunt May role. The story has made that particular version of Aunt May important.

Even if you compressed the first Insomniac game into a film, I think that underlying dramatic structure would remain stronger than what the MCU gave Marisa Tomei across three movies. MCU May’s death tells us what she is supposed to mean to Peter. Insomniac May’s life demonstrates it.

Jean Grey exposes the problem

The most damning comparison may actually exist within BND itself. Jean Grey receives far less screen time than MJ has received across this series, yet I came away understanding and sympathising with Jean more.

Jean has a specific loss, a goal, anger, a worldview and morally troubling methods. She exists in conflict with Peter, but her story does not revolve around him. I understand why she is doing what she is doing, even when I disagree with how far she goes. She feels like a person who entered Peter’s story from a life that was already happening.

After four films, MJ still often feels like someone whose story activates when Peter needs a love interest.

That doesn’t mean Jean is automatically the better person or that every detail of her story is perfectly executed. It means the film gives her an independent dramatic engine. She wants something for reasons that have nothing to do with Peter Parker, and that alone gives her a specificity MJ has rarely been afforded.

Peter’s loneliness works, but his specific losses don’t always

BND still works for me emotionally despite all of this. Loneliness is powerful. Watching Peter live with nobody to call, nobody who remembers him and no clear route back into the lives he sacrificed is moving. Holland may be giving his best performance as the character, and the movie understands how isolation can eat away at someone but that does not retroactively make MJ, Ned or Aunt May more developed.

The ideal version of this story would make both emotional levels work simultaneously. I would feel the universal horror of Peter being alone while also feeling that these specific, vividly drawn people were irreplaceable. Instead, I mostly feel the first.

Peter’s supporting cast should not merely embody abstract concepts like friendship, family and romance. They should feel like individuals whose absence changes the exact shape of his life.

MJ should not merely represent the woman Peter loves. Ned should not merely represent the best friend Peter lost. May should not become the moral influence whose death defines him only when the screenplay is ready to kill her.

Those roles carry automatic emotional power because we understand what love, friendship and family mean. But the films still have to make us care about the particular people occupying them.

I care that Peter has nobody. After four movies, I’m still not sure the MCU has given me enough reason to care that the people he no longer has are specifically these versions of MJ, Ned and Aunt May.

TL;DR: BND portrays Peter’s loneliness extremely well, but most of that emotion comes from the universal horror of isolation rather than my investment in the specific people he has lost. After four films, MJ and Ned still lack enough interiority, independent relationships and life outside Peter to feel genuinely irreplaceable, while Aunt May was suddenly assigned enormous moral importance shortly before her death without the previous films doing enough to establish that role. Tom Holland and Zendaya’s performances, the audience’s familiarity with Spider-Man mythology and the inherent sadness of Peter having nobody are carrying emotional weight the writing never completely earned. I mourn the emptiness of Peter’s life far more than I mourn the absence of these particular characters, and that exposes how underdeveloped his supporting cast has always been.

The X-Men obviously have one of the most diverse rosters in superhero comics. Storm, Bishop, Sunspot, Synch, Forge, Dani Moonstar, Jubilee, Karma, Monet and plenty of others have had important roles and good stories but that is not my point.

The contradiction is that a franchise whose entire identity is built around prejudice, marginalisation and minority oppression still has an overwhelmingly white group of permanent icons. Wolverine, Cyclops, Xavier, Magneto, Jean, Gambit, Beast, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Iceman, Angel, Cable, Emma and Rogue are repeatedly treated as indispensable. Most non-white mutants receive importance under one particular writer or during one particular era before becoming supporting characters again.

Storm is the obvious exception, but one iconic Black woman cannot carry the racial legitimacy of the entire franchise. Bishop, Sunspot, Synch and Forge have all received strong material, yet none has anything approaching her permanence or mainstream recognition and that is especially glaring for a franchise constantly praised for representing minorities.

The defence that “mutants already represent every minority” only makes the contradiction worse. A fictional metaphor for racism should create more room to centre actual racial minorities, not make them unnecessary. Storm does not stop being a Black African woman because she is a mutant. Sunspot does not stop being Afro-Brazilian. Forge does not stop being Indigenous. Magneto’s Jewish identity certainly does not become irrelevant. Those identities deepen the metaphor yet the franchise has often treated mutant identity as though it overrides every other form of identity. A Black mutant, an Indigenous mutant and a white mutant are not necessarily going to experience prejudice, institutions or even mutant persecution in exactly the same way. The comics have explored that intersection occasionally, but nowhere near as consistently as the X-Men’s reputation would suggest. For a franchise supposedly built to examine marginalisation, it is strange how often the metaphor flattens actual differences instead of exploring how they overlap.

Instead, white mutants are often treated as universal representatives of marginalisation while actual minorities remain optional within the franchise’s permanent hierarchy. The X-Men borrow imagery from segregation, hate crimes, registration and genocide, but most of the characters permanently entrusted with representing those themes are still white.

The other defence is that characters like Bishop or Synch simply are not popular enough but popularity does not develop in a vacuum. Marvel has spent decades giving the same characters the biggest stories, relationships, adaptations, marketing and repeated chances to matter. Marvel cannot underinvest in characters and then use the resulting popularity gap to justify continuing to underinvest in them.

Readers obviously have agency, and not every pushed character becomes successful. But Marvel still controls who gets reinvented, who appears in cartoons and films, and who receives another chance after a bad storyline. White X-Men can survive decades of bad writing without losing their permanent positions. Non-white mutants can receive one strong run and disappear when the writer changes.

Historical context explains how this started, but it does not excuse why it continues. Marvel began in an overwhelmingly white industry, but Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus all debuted together in 1975. Gambit, Cable and Deadpool arrived even later and still became major icons. Marvel clearly can elevate later characters when it chooses to.

That is why the MCU has no excuse to recreate the same hierarchy. I am not asking for Cyclops, Wolverine or Gambit to be removed or raceswapped. I am asking why Bishop, Sunspot, Synch, Forge or another existing mutant of colour cannot also be made central from the beginning. Marvel Studios will determine who mainstream audiences care about through casting, writing, marketing and screen time. It cannot sideline these characters and later claim audiences were never interested in them.

The X-Men already have the characters. What they have lacked is sustained commitment. For an IP built around minority oppression, its reluctance to make actual minorities permanent pillars is not a minor oversight. It is the central contradiction behind its reputation for diversity.

TL;DR: The X-Men have plenty of non-white characters, but with Storm as the major exception Marvel rarely treats them as permanent, franchise-defining pillars. That is a glaring contradiction for an IP built around minority oppression, especially when mutant identity is so often used as a substitute for exploring real race and intersectionality. The MCU should elevate existing characters like Bishop, Sunspot, Synch or Forge instead of reproducing the same overwhelmingly white hierarchy.

God, the more I think about Deadpool 2, the worse it gets. The first Deadpool is not some profound masterpiece, but it has something both sequels increasingly lack: an authentic emotional foundation. Wade and Vanessa’s relationship is the heart of the film. We spend time with them, understand why they work and believe Wade’s fear that his appearance has made him unworthy of returning to her. Then Deadpool 2 looks at the best part of the first movie and shoots it in the chest before the opening credits.

Vanessa begins the film talking about starting a family. Minutes later, she is killed by a random criminal because the screenplay needs Wade to be sad. She stops being a character and becomes emotional fuel for his depression, suicide attempts and sudden paternal attachment to Russell. It is blatant fridging and making jokes about lazy writing does not make the writing less lazy.

The film desperately wants to seem emotionally ambitious. Wade grieves, tries to die and repeatedly sees Vanessa in the afterlife. Saving Russell is supposed to teach him that he can still have a family but making a character miserable is not the same as developing them.

Wade barely knows Russell, yet their supposed father-son bond has to carry the entire climax. The film simply declares that Russell is Wade’s new family and expects the audience to fill in the missing development. Cable is also motivated by his murdered wife and daughter, because apparently this screenplay can only make men care about anything by killing their families...

Then Wade travels back in time and saves Vanessa anyway which does not fix the fridging and honestly just makes it even cheaper. The film uses Vanessa’s death to generate two hours of grief and forced character development, then reverses it during the same comedy montage where Wade saves Peter and kills his X-Men Origins counterpart. It wants the emotional impact of permanent tragedy without having the nerve to commit to one. Vanessa’s death is supposedly devastating enough to justify the entire plot, but disposable enough to undo for a punchline.

And after Wade literally rewrites history to save the love of his life, Deadpool & Wolverine reveals that they broke up off-screen anyway. That is almost impressive in its contempt for the audience.

The first two films tell us Vanessa is the centre of Wade’s life. He survives torture for the possibility of returning to her and destroys the timeline to resurrect her. Then the third film skips six years and says their relationship collapsed because Wade became depressed after the Avengers rejected him. That COULD have been a decent story but the film simply cannot be bothered to tell it. We get one brief flashback where Vanessa says Wade withdrew and stopped caring. She then spends the rest of the film standing around as evidence that Wade has failed at life.

Once again, she is not treated as a person with her own perspective. She is a measuring stick for Wade’s emotional condition. When he is broken, he loses her. Once he saves the universe and proves that he “matters,” the ending hints that he might earn her back but what does Vanessa want? What happened to their plans to have a child? What was their relationship like after Deadpool 2? What has she been doing for six years? The movie does not give a shit. It needed Wade to begin the story lonely and pathetic, so it destroyed their relationship off-screen and moved on.

All this does though is expose the creative bankruptcy behind both sequels. The writers seem incapable of imagining Wade experiencing insecurity, depression or failure while remaining in a loving relationship. Vanessa cannot support him through a crisis because that would require writing an adult relationship with actual conflict and development. It is easier to kill her or dump her between movies.

The same problem applies to Wade’s wider “family.” Deadpool & Wolverine gathers Vanessa, Peter, Blind Al, Dopinder, Colossus, Negasonic and Yukio into Wade’s apartment so it can announce that these are the people he must save.

Then almost all of them disappear. They are not involved in Wade’s journey. They barely speak to him. Most have no meaningful role in the story. They are assembled into a group photograph and turned into hostages for the plot. The film constantly insists Wade is fighting for his family while spending almost none of its runtime developing that family. It is far more interested in cameos, multiverse jokes and giving Wolverine another redemption arc. Logan’s guilt at least comes from something he actually did. His failure is explained, confronted and connected to Laura. Wade’s crisis comes from major events that happened off-screen because the screenplay needed to reset him to rock bottom.

So the pattern is his relationships are repeatedly destroyed, exploited and vaguely restored because these films have no idea how to create emotional stakes without smashing the same toy over and over again. It is not profound. It is not mature. It is emotional vandalism disguised as "character development".

The first Deadpool understood that Wade could be funny, violent, insecure and deeply in love at the same time. The sequels treat love and stability as obstacles that must be removed before the “real” story can begin. At this point, Wade’s family does not feel like something these films care about but like a button the writers press whenever they need Wade or the audience to cry.

TL;DR: Deadpool 2 kills Vanessa to manufacture depth, resurrects her once her death has served the plot, and then Deadpool & Wolverine breaks them up off-screen so Wade can repeat another hollow “learn that you matter” arc. Both sequels treat Wade’s family as disposable emotional leverage because they cannot create stakes without destroying the relationships the first film made us care about.

After the recent Black Panther casting news I’ve once again noticed occasional criticism from Black Americans whenever another Black British actor becomes successful in Hollywood, particularly when they are cast as African American characters.

Some of the criticism is understandable when a role is culturally specific and people believe an African American actor would bring greater authenticity to it but other comments seem less concerned with the individual performance and more frustrated that Black British actors are succeeding in Hollywood at all.

Is this mainly about limited opportunities for Black American actors? Is there a belief that British actors are being preferred because of their accents, training or perceived respectability? Or is the tension being exaggerated by social media, with a vocal minority appearing more representative than it really is?

Its clear to me a lot of the discomfort women have with bisexual men is not really about cheating, disease or the man being “secretly gay.” Those are often just the respectable explanations pasted over a much uglier insecurity. For some women, femininity is their ENTIRE value proposition in heterosexual dating.

They have been taught that men provide masculinity, women provide femininity, and that being feminine is what makes them uniquely desirable and gives them leverage over men. Their beauty, softness, female body and performance of femininity are treated as the main things they bring to the relationship so a bisexual man completely disrupts that fantasy.

He is not exclusively attracted to femininity. He can find masculinity desirable. He can be attracted to bodies, traits and sexual dynamics that no woman can provide by becoming prettier, thinner, softer or more feminine which is what makes it so threatening to them.

Competing with another woman is understandable within the normal heterosexual script. She can compare herself to her, imitate her or reassure herself that she is still the more attractive woman. A man is different. She cannot “out-woman” him because he is offering something entirely outside her category and so suddenly, her femininity is no longer the trump card she thought it was.

She then has to confront an uncomfortable question: if simply being feminine is not enough to make her uniquely valuable, what else does she actually bring to the relationship?

Her personality? Loyalty? Humour? Emotional support? Compatibility? Shared values?

Those should obviously matter more, but plenty of people have built their entire dating identity around gender performance. Men do the same thing with money, status, strength and masculinity. When the trait you thought guaranteed your value stops being exclusive, insecurity follows.

To be clear this does not mean every woman who refuses to date bisexual men thinks this way. Nobody is obligated to date anyone. But the intensity of the disgust and insecurity a lot of women display cannot always be explained by simple “preference.”

Sometimes it is because a bisexual man exposes how fragile their sense of romantic value actually is. Their femininity was supposed to be the one thing a male partner could only get from them and once that is no longer enough, they are forced to wonder whether they have anything else to offer (they often don't have much else)

I think we can all agree Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider is genuinely exciting casting. He’s an actor who regularly chooses filmmakers with distinctive voices. Drive, Blade Runner 2049, The Nice Guys, First Man, Barbie and now Project Hail Mary are all very different films, but they have actual personality behind them.

So when I hear Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider, I think this could get weird. It could be funny, stylish and properly supernatural. It feels like the kind of role he would only take if there was something interesting behind it.

The reason I’m only cautiously optimistic is Shawn Levy though.

I don’t think Levy is a bad director. He is incredibly reliable, commercially minded and clearly knows how to deliver the film a major studio wants. Marvel hiring him after Deadpool & Wolverine makes complete sense but I still don’t really know what a Shawn Levy film looks or feels like?

I know what a Nolan, Villeneuve, Jordan Peele or Ryan Coogler film feels like. I even know what a Michael Bay film feels like, for better or worse. Levy’s recent films Free Guy, The Adam Project and Deadpool & Wolverine feel much more driven by Ryan Reynolds as a brand than by Levy’s own directorial voice.

Yes this doesn’t mean his Ghost Rider movie will automatically be generic. We know practically nothing about it, and maybe Levy has a much stronger vision for this than his previous films would suggest. Gosling being involved is arguably a reason to believe there is more to the project than another standard Marvel blockbuster.

I just hope Marvel didn’t hire Levy purely because he is considered a safe pair of hands.

Ghost Rider shouldn’t merely be a competent CGI blockbuster that makes loads of money and is reasonably fun for two hours. This is a character who needs a movie with an actual identity and Gosling gives me hope that it will have one but Levy is the reason I’m waiting to see more before getting completely excited...

Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider is genuinely exciting but that excitement drops considerably, however, when you find out Shawn Levy is directing.

I'm sorry, but Levy feels like the ultimate company man to me. He is there to deliver exactly the film the studio wants. He is incredibly reliable, commercially minded and clearly knows how to make a successful blockbuster but I don't know what a Shawn Levy film looks or feels like.

I know what a Christopher Nolan film feels like. I know what a Denis Villeneuve, Greta Gerwig, Jordan Peele or Ryan Coogler film feels like. I even know what a Michael Bay film feels like, for better or worse. I cannot tell you what Shawn Levy's identity as a filmmaker is.

For the last few years, he has mostly just felt like Ryan Reynolds' director. The Adam Project, Free Guy and Deadpool & Wolverine all feel far more driven by Ryan Reynolds as a brand than by any recognisable directorial voice from Levy and I guess that is fine if your goal is simply to make a fun, accessible blockbuster.

But I don't see Ryan Gosling as just another blockbuster actor. Especially coming off something like Project Hail Mary, which is still a blockbuster but clearly has some personality behind it. Then you look at the rest of his filmography: Drive, Blade Runner 2049, The Nice Guys, Barbie and First Man. He tends to work with filmmakers who have distinctive voices.

So when I hear Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider, I think this could get weird. It could be funny. It could lean heavily into the supernatural. It could actually have a real personality. Then I hear Shawn Levy is directing, and I immediately picture a competent CGI blockbuster. There will probably be some fun in it. It will probably make loads of money. But I can't say I'm excited for it.

This story feels like an answer to something a lot of romance anime either neglect or actively avoid dealing with: what happens to the girls who don’t get chosen?

Most love triangles and harems spend the entire story making us care about several heroines, but once the protagonist finally chooses someone, the others suddenly become a problem the story needs to clear away. They get a rejection scene, cry for a bit, congratulate the couple and then the story ends or jumps forward. We are told they moved on, but we rarely see how.

That has always felt like romance stories backing away from the most interesting consequence of the situation they created. If a girl has spent years loving someone, her feelings wouldn’t just disappear because the protagonist’s romantic arc is complete. She still has to see him afterwards. She might still be friends with him and the girl he chose. She has to deal with jealousy, embarrassment, regret and whether staying close to them is actually helping her or just making things worse.

Anna is still attached to Sosuke and has to adjust to being around him and Karen as a couple. Lemon is left thinking about whether things could have gone differently if she had acted sooner. Komari’s rejection is connected to her fear of losing the literature club and the first place where she has properly started to belong. They are all “losing heroines”, but the show doesn’t treat rejection as one generic experience and I like how it affects each of them differently because their feelings, relationships and circumstances are different.

I also really like that Nukumizu isn’t immediately used as a replacement boyfriend. He mostly becomes their friend and gets dragged into helping them deal with everything. There are romantic undertones, obviously, but the girls aren’t instantly cured of their previous feelings because a new male protagonist has entered the room.

That is where I think Makeine separates itself from series like Nisekoi or The Quintessential Quintuplets. Those stories do give the rejected heroines emotional scenes, but once the final choice is made, there is naturally a rush to wrap everything up. We might see that they eventually moved forward, but the actual process is mostly skipped because the main romance has already reached its conclusion.

It also helps that the girls are still allowed to be funny, petty, selfish and annoying. The series takes their feelings seriously without turning them into tragic saints who do nothing except suffer over boys.

Romance anime obviously doesn’t need every heroine to end up with the protagonist. Rejection is part of the genre. I just think too many stories want all the drama and emotional investment that comes from having multiple romantic options, then avoid dealing with the fallout once a choice is finally made. Makeine works because it starts exactly where those stories usually stop.

Can someone explain why so many people seem completely convinced that Thor crying over Deadpool was definitely foreshadowing a future event?

It is recycled footage from Thor: The Dark World with Deadpool replacing Loki. The joke is that Wade sees himself inserted into one of the MCU’s most emotional scenes and immediately becomes obsessed with finding out why Thor apparently cares about him that much.

Thats called a gag.

Shawn Levy was directly asked why Thor was crying and said, “I don’t fucking know. No one does.” He also said Deadpool & Wolverine was not made to set up another film and that Marvel did not require them to build towards some future storyline.

Despite that, people still discuss the scene as though Marvel secretly filmed part of an important Secret Wars moment years in advance. What is that actually based on? Ryan Reynolds posting “I know why Thor was crying”? Reynolds making a joke while promoting a comedy film is not confirmation of a planned storyline.

Could Marvel eventually bring the gag back because it became popular? Of course. Marvel can retroactively turn almost anything into a callback. But that would be them creating a payoff later, not proof that the original scene was carefully planned foreshadowing.

There is an important difference between:

“This joke could be referenced again.”

and:

“This is definitely a real future scene and Marvel already knows exactly how it happens.”

The first is entirely possible. The second is speculation being repeated so confidently that people are starting to treat it as confirmed information. Not every joke is a breadcrumb, and not every throwaway scene is a five-year setup.

Between people understandably being pissed off about Sony’s physical media decision, the response to the latest trailer and the inevitable anti-woke bullshit, I’m already expecting this game to get review bombed from several different directions.

Obviously that doesn’t mean every negative review will be dishonest or that the game is somehow above criticism. It could come out and have plenty of genuine problems. But I’m going into release assuming the user score will tell us practically nothing about the actual quality of the game, because so many people will be rating Sony, Insomniac’s previous games, the character designs or whatever culture-war controversy is happening that week instead of reviewing Wolverine itself...

Honestly I’m getting genuinely tired of how many expensive Hollywood films look like someone drained half the colour out of them before release. Everything is grey, brown, pale blue or covered in this dull metallic filter. Skin looks washed out, costumes that should be bright look strangely faded and even massive fantasy locations somehow resemble abandoned industrial estates. These films cost hundreds of millions and take place in completely fictional worlds, yet visually they’re often less imaginative than something shot in an ordinary city.

And before anyone says it, no, I don’t think every movie needs to look like a bag of Skittles exploded across the screen. Yes a muted palette can be a deliberate artistic choice. Yes horror, war films, crime thrillers or bleak dramas can obviously benefit from restrained colour. We all know this but the problem is that it no longer feels restrained or deliberate but like the default setting for any blockbuster that wants to be taken seriously.

Christopher Nolan is an obvious example for me. I respect the craft involved in his movies, especially the practical effects and large-format cinematography, but I find a lot of his actual colour palettes incredibly dull. So much grey, beige, black, steel blue and brown. His films are visually recognisable, so I wouldn’t call them badly directed, but I rarely find myself excited by the actual images. Even when the scale is enormous, the palette makes everything feel weirdly emotionally flat to me.

Don't even get me started on The Russo brothers’ Marvel films because they are worse for this. The Winter Soldier’s grey political-thriller look at least matches the story, but then that same general washed-out style follows them into Civil War, Infinity War and Endgame. Why??

Civil War is probably the biggest offender. You have characters wearing bright red, blue and purple costumes fighting in broad daylight, yet the airport battle looks like it’s taking place underneath a permanent layer of dust. The Russos have said the lack of colour was intentional because the characters were entering a morally grey situation, but that explanation almost makes it more annoying. “The story is morally grey, therefore the image must literally be grey” is such a painfully obvious visual metaphor. Infinity War has entire alien planets, magical stones and armies of bizarre creatures, but large parts of it are still dominated by muddy browns and greys. Oh man and Endgame spends so much time in dim rooms that even the supposedly huge return of every hero ends up happening on a brown battlefield beneath a grey sky and I'm sorry but despite how epic is was to watch that final battle it is SO ugly to me.

This might annoy some you but it’s why I genuinely appreciate James Gunn’s work so much, regardless of what anyone thinks of his writing or sense of humour. His films actually look like they were made by someone who enjoys colour. GOTG 2 has huge areas of gold, purple, pink, blue and green. Ego’s planet doesn’t just look like another quarry with some CGI buildings added. The environments, costumes, lighting and even the characters themselves all contribute to a specific visual identity.

The Suicide Squad (which is super underrated in my opinion) has filthy locations and plenty of violence, but it still uses strong reds, yellows, greens and blues. It understands that a movie can be violent, cynical and aimed at adults without making every frame resemble wet concrete. His Superman also understands that Superman’s world should have some visual warmth. The suit is properly blue and red. Metropolis has colour. The stranger creatures and locations are allowed to look strange instead of being forced into the same generic military realism as everything else.

God this is why the recent Supergirl film disappoints me visually because it suffers from all this despite existing within Gunn’s DCU. Supergirl Woman of Tomorrow is an incredibly expressive comic. Bilquis Evely’s art and Mat Lopes’ colouring give it these huge, beautiful cosmic landscapes that feel like fantasy paintings. Every planet has its own atmosphere, architecture and colour language. The film takes that material and gives so much of it a grimy, washed-out space-western appearance. It isn’t completely colourless, but compared to the comic it feels like an enormous loss of personality. This honestly might have been a project James Gunn should have written and directed in hindsight but hey what can you do...

Anyway the main frustration here is that comics, animation and video games are full of interesting visual choices that live-action filmmakers seemingly can’t wait to remove. A character might come from a world filled with impossible architecture, exaggerated lighting and carefully chosen colours, then the movie adaptation decides everything needs to look more “grounded" and "grounded" to these people apparently means grey buildings, grey skies, grey costumes and actors standing in a grey field while grey CGI smoke covers half the screen. Ridiculous.

Why even adapt fantasy if you’re embarrassed by the fantasy?

These people need to understand that colour isn’t childish. Stylisation isn’t automatically less mature. A bright red cape or an aggressively purple sky doesn’t prevent a story from dealing with grief, war, trauma or morality. In fact, using colour intelligently can make those emotions hit harder because the film has an actual visual language beyond making sad scenes darker.

Mad Max: Fury Road is mostly set in a desert and still uses intense oranges, blues and reds to create some of the most memorable blockbuster images of the last decade. The Batman is dark for nearly its entire runtime, but its blacks, reds and amber lighting give it an identity. Yes its an animated project but Spider-Verse uses colour to communicate emotion, character and even which universe someone belongs to. They did this in fact so well it seemingly inspire other projects like GOAT, and the recent TMNT movie.

All in all these movies prove the choice isn’t between colourful nonsense and serious grey realism. You CAN have atmosphere, weight and visual imagination at the same time. I just want big fantasy and superhero films to stop looking embarrassed by colour. You have imaginary planets, gods, monsters, magic, aliens and people flying through the sky. There is absolutely NO reason the finished movie should look less visually adventurous than my local car park in November.

TL;DR: Hollywood keeps using washed-out grey colour palettes as a shortcut for seriousness, even in fantasy and superhero movies that should look visually imaginative. James Gunn’s work stands out because it’s vibrant and distinct, while filmmakers like Nolan and the Russos often make huge expensive movies look dull. The recent Supergirl adaptation is especially disappointing because it abandons much of the comic’s expressive colour and visual identity.

For all the criticism Spider-Man 2’s story gets (a lot of which I think is hyperbole but thats a different convo), I think it has one of the best versions of Peter and Harry’s friendship.

A lot of adaptations tell us these two are best friends, but barely let them actually behave like it. Their relationship is usually already being poisoned by jealousy, Norman, MJ or Harry becoming the Goblin. Harry feels less like Peter’s friend and more like a future villain the story hasn’t activated yet.

SM2 actually spends time showing why they like each other. They have shared memories, stupid jokes and ambitions that go beyond Harry simply orbiting Peter’s life. The school flashback, bike ride, Coney Island and Emily-May Foundation all make them feel like people who genuinely enjoy being around each other. Harry doesn’t return just to be jealous of Peter either. He gives Peter a job, believes in his intelligence and wants them to build something meaningful together.

Even MJ feels like an actual mutual friend rather than a prize placed between them. For once, the friendship isn’t immediately reduced to two men quietly resenting each other over the same woman.

I think that foundation is what makes Harry’s downfall work for me, even if the Venom section itself is rushed. Harry is dying, Peter is unknowingly keeping the only thing that might save him, Norman constantly makes Harry feel inadequate and the symbiote is turning Peter into an asshole. The friendship falls apart because several awful circumstances collide, not because Harry was secretly a jealous prick from the beginning.

Most versions write Peter and Harry as future enemies who happen to be friends first. Insomniac actually writes them as best friends, then shows that friendship being destroyed. Whatever problems the rest of the story may or may not have, I think they handled that part very well.