u/carbonera99

The Joker, like Batman, has no powers. He's just "a guy". Like Batman though, the Joker is armed with an arsenal of random-ass skills and expertise in basically anything the plot requires. He can rig elaborate traps, formulate a proprietary neurotoxin that can kill someone by making them laugh themselves to death, somehow fight Batman hand-to-hand and hold his own,

Unlike Batman though, who has an entire backstory detailing his 10-20 year journey where he acquires all of these skills and expertise, the Joker is just inexplicably able to do all these things with zero justification. His backstory is a complete mystery, and even in stories where he does have a concrete past, he's still able to do all the regular Joker activities that other versions of his character are capable of. The versions of him who were supposedly just failed comedians who fell in a vat of acid are still able to rig bombs, create Joker Toxin, etc.

The common defense to this is the aphorism "Joker's past is a multiple choice question". I find this aspect of the character to be basically self-defeating. You can't shroud your character's past in mystery and make it so any backstory could be just as likely if you give your character skills and expertise that they could only acquire if they had a specific background.

An ex-comedian Joker can't have the skills of a genius engineer. A Joker who has the combat skills to go toe to toe with Batman can't be the same Joker who has a backstory of being a normal civilian who worked some blue collar job at a chemical plant. Each new detail provided about the Joker narrows down that "multiple choice question".

The Joker is billed as "normal man who had one bad day" but he might as well be a magical leprechaun because that's honestly how most Batman stories handle him. He can do anything the story requires him to do, devoid of logic or consistency. He has more in common with the Superman villain Mr. Mxyzptlk than the other human villains in Batman's Rogues Gallery like Riddler or Black Mask. Literally the only reasonable explanation for why the Joker has an infinite repertoire of skills that grow and shrink every other day is if he's some magical creature that runs on the concept of schadenfreude.

Miles Morales being a carbon copy of Peter Parker in this aspect has never felt like the right choice for me. They differentiated Miles from Peter by giving him extra powers that Peter doesn't have, which I feel like is the perfect excuse not to make him a STEM genius like Peter.

Since Miles fundamentally has stronger powers than Peter, I don't think its the right approach to make him problem-solve in the exact same ways Peter does.

Peter developed all of those gadgets precisely because his powers aren't as versatile as the latter-day Spider-People. The problems that Peter engineers his way around, other Spider-People like Miles can just solve with different applications of their powers. For example, Spider-People who have organic webbing like Silk don't have to carry around web shooters or special webbing types because they can just do that on their own. Spider-Man needs spider bots to covertly snoop around and gather intel, Miles can do that with his cloaking. Peter needed a special gadget to disrupt Vulture's wings during their first confrontation but MIles can just blast them out of the sky with his own electric powers.

I honestly feel like they should have just gone all the way and given Miles organic webbing as well, just to fully divorce his character from the gadgeteering side of Spider-Man.

If you read a lot of online discourse around Miles, there's a lot of people who get salty that Miles progressively gets more and more superpowers in every run while Peter is slowly left in the dust. This disparity wouldn't exist if Peter had his own unique niche that other Spider-People can't encroach on, which should be his intellect and resourcefulness. I don't think it's enough that he's the "most experienced Spider-Man" if Miles and others can do almost everything he does but better. There should be things they can't do, because despite having similar powers to Peter, they don't have his scientific mind.

I think it also just helps differentiate the characters and helps dodge the unfounded allegations of Miles being Spider Jr. or just a replacement Spider-Man. Miles isn't Peter, and I feel like he should have different interests to highlight that.

This is why I'm glad the Spider-Verse films emphasize him more as an artist than a super genius STEM scientist. It's a big part of his character in these films that people don't acknowledge enough. This version of Miles Morales has a passion for street art, which is shared with his uncle. His wall murals are used to bookend the first movie, and even his first ever Spider-Man suit had a spray-paint aesthetic to it. The second movie carries this character element forward by showing how he designed his own custom suit and has an entire sketchbook filled with art from his first movie's adventure. I bet his passion for art will play some part in the upcoming third movie as well.

I'm NOT saying Miles Morales should be some illiterate moron. He's still incredibly intelligent in the Spider-Verse films (he still goes to Brooklyn Visions Academy, which is touted as a top NYC prep school in that universe) but the movies don't really emphasize him as the same kind of gadgeteering genius that his universe's Peter Parker was before he died. (In the first movie, it's literally revealed that this universe's Peter has a Batman-ass "Spider Cave") I feel like you can have the character be a brilliant academic without making him the same kind of scientific savant Peter is supposed to be. (A lot of comics put Peter right up there with Iron Man and Reed Richards in terms of ingenuity)

In Star Wars, it’s a common practice to periodically “memory wipe” a droid to basically reset it to factory settings. This is done to prevent information leaks, and more importantly to suppress the formation of a sapient identity. In Star Wars, it’s implied that any droid with a sufficiently advanced AI can and will form a distinct identity and personality if given enough time, outside of its programming. There’s multiple examples of droids who’ve gone without memory wipes for multiple years developing what is undeniably a form of sapience.

R2D2 is the most famous example. R2’s memory banks are untouched from as early as the Clone Wars, which means it’s accrued basically 30 years of life experience by the time the original trilogy roles around. R2 displays agency and a distinct personality that other astromech droids of his exact model don’t display and has interpersonal relationships with other droids and people that it retains even after decades. The people around him don’t treat him like a disposable roomba, they go out of their way to protect R2 and treat him like an old family friend. I think an even more overt example is L3-37 from the Solo movie. L3 is basically indistinguishable from a human character. It has dreams, goals, and a personal ideology and belief system completely divorced from what it was originally programmed for. L3 and Lando literally have an implied romance in the film and Lando is devastated when L3 “dies”.

If almost every droid is capable of developing sapience after enough time, then memory wipes aren’t simply resetting a machine to factory settings, or optimizing the performance on a computer. The practice of droid memory wipes is essentially a lobotomy at best, straight up murder at worst. You’re wiping out basically everything that makes that droid distinctly its own thing and reverting it back to an empty husk with programmed directives.

Guns are basically just suggestions in a lot of fictional settings, especially horror. Resident Evil breaks the mold on both fronts by being a horror fiction setting where guns are inexplicably overpowered.

The setting of Resident Evil is packed to the rafters with insane bioweapons, either cooked up in a lab using genetic-engineering technology so advanced it might as well be magic, or sourced in nature from an ancient species of parasite, flower, and fungi that all have such groundbreaking properties that it might as well be magic.

Despite being a straight up sci-fi setting when it comes to the threats, nothing the Resident Evil franchise has ever introduced in its 25+ years of storytelling can withstand the power of contemporary firearms. Zombies, zombie dogs, zombie mutants, parasite-ridden villagers, parasite bugs, parasite bug mutants, fungus zombies, fungus werewolves, fungus vampires, fungus dragon, fungus leviathan, fungus X-Men; it doesn’t matter what it is, they all get mowed down by a single guy or girl with a few guns. These aren’t sci-fi guns either, they’re just regular guns the protagonists scrounged off the floor in a dusty storage shed.

Even the worst, most powerful threats (bullet-proof super soldier, a building sized king parasite, a literal fungal goddess) all get packed up by a single RPG round.

This can’t be called a gameplay-only contrivance either. In cutscenes and canon movies, the bioweapons are just as allergic to lead as they are in the games. There is no ludonarrative dissonance going on here. Guns are just that powerful in the Resident Evil universe.

The New Hope kind of just glosses over the fact that Luke Skywalker lost his aunt and uncle in the most brutal way possible. He didn’t just see his childhood home burned to the ground, iirc, the movie showed literal blackened and charred skeletons of his aunt and uncle which Obi-wan helpfully informs Luke, was definitely done by Storm Trooper blaster fire.

This feels like it should be a bigger deal for Luke’s character than the movies treat it as. Luke is just fine in the very next scene. This guy never knew his birth parents. For all intents and purposes, his aunt and uncle are his parents that he lived with for his entire life until then. Sure they butted heads and made him do manual labor around the farm but the movie never implies that Luke had a bad or even strained relationship with his aunt and uncle. Yet Luke doesn’t even mention his aunt and uncle by name a single time for the rest of the movie, or the rest of the trilogy, or the rest of the franchise for that matter. I feel like most casual fans don’t even remember their names, that’s how nonexistent they’re treated by the story.

Luke isn’t extra vengeful towards the Empire or even cites the murder of his aunt and uncle as the reason why he’s going along with Obi-wan to the Death Star, he’s just jazzed that he gets to rescue a princess.

Having your parental figures murdered before your eyes feels like it should be a character defining moment for Luke, but it just… isn’t. He’s more cut up about Obi-wan’s death, a weird hermit man he’s only been vaguely acquainted with over the years. This is the equivalent of if Spider-Man had just shrugged off the death of Uncle Ben and moved on with his life.

The writer clearly just thought of Owen and Bert as an obstacle to get out of the way so Luke could start his heroes’ journey, and the plot treats them with according amounts of disrespect as they’re unceremoniously shunted out of the series to never be mentioned again outside of that Disney+ original Obi-wan show.

A lot of "year 0" Batman stories that are about him as a rookie just establishing himself as the Batman play around with the idea that for at least a few months to a year of him operating as a vigilante, he flies under the radar and most people assume he's a hoax or an urban legend. This is relatively easy to pull off in a more grounded continuity where Batman is among the first generation superheroes in history and it's only after he gets established that the really whacky stuff like aliens and supervillains and magic etc. becomes public knowledge. But most DC continuities don't actually take this approach.

I'm not just talking about the James Gunn DCU where superheroes have been a thing for 300 years. Even in the comics' continuity, there's been lots of famous superheroes who chronologically existed prior to Batman. I remember reading that in one DC universe, there's even a fictional amendment to the United States constitution that permits costumed superheroes to testify in court without revealing their identities.

There's a historical precedence for superheroes and other whacky fantastical things existing in America, so the idea that Gotham would be so skeptical of the existence of a bat guy who fights criminals is kind of a hard sell. Even if no one believes they're a human vigilante, wouldn't people just assume he's a bat monster or demon? Other nearby cities have way stranger things popping out of the woodwork. Metropolis is like right next door and they have an a bulletproof flying alien. Sure, you could just chalk it up to Batman not operating in the limelight initially and never being photographed, but it's not like Batman conceals the aftermath of his vigilante activities. There's concrete proof of criminals being beaten up and apprehended, and eyewitness testimony from those same criminals who all attest to the same bat thing being the one that did them in.

A guy who dresses like a bat is one of the least weird things you'd hear about in the DC universe.

Radagast is one of only five demigod wizards who were tasked with protecting the world from the clutches of evil by capital G God himself, and this shroomed up moron decided that a better use of his time would be doing environmental conservation work instead.

Sauron was actively waging war on Middle-Earth and this guy was fucking around in the woods smelling the roses. Apparently it never crossed his mind that if the world of men fell to the Dark Lord, all the nature would also be destroyed by him eventually. Prioritizing nature over humanity makes no sense when Sauron is an imminent threat to both. I don’t even think this bum was doing a great job protecting nature anyway, Sauron and Saruman’s orc forces were chopping down forests left and right to feed their war machine.

Radagast is the only wizard who didn’t pull his weight. Even the two unnamed Blue Wizards who don’t even appear in the main story were apparently contributing to the war effort by tying up Sauron’s forces in the East and South. Even Saruman helped out a little bit before he decided to switch sides. Radagast had one job and he still couldn’t lock in and help the ONLY time it actually mattered. Sauron was the end all be all threat to Middle-Earth. Fighting Dark Lords like him is literally the reason the wizards were put on Middle-Earth.

Eru Iluvatar must have been trolling when he picked out Radagast to be one of the Istari. Literally anyone else would have been more useful. Literal hobbit hillbillies from bumfuck nowhere did more to stop Sauron than this demigod who had a cosmic duty to fight evil.

Most people talking about this aspect of the film focus on his impressive set-up, his high-tech fabricator machine, and his advanced AI assistant, but honestly those things are explainable. He could have easily stolen or salvaged all that tech from Stark over the 4 or 5 years he's been operating alone. His old Spider-Men suits explicitly had AI installed in them and it's not like those suits were completely destroyed by the end of No Way Home, so he could have retrofitted that AI onto his new setup.

What can't be explained away is the fact that this mf is unemployed but can afford to live alone in a spacious apartment and can afford basic necessities like clothing and food pretty casually without any sign that he's scrimping and saving just to get by.

Peter Parker in Brand New Day does not work. He is Spider-Man full-time. He doesn't deliver pizza, he doesn't work at a lab, he doesn't even take pictures of himself for the Daily Bugle. He's like that one meme about the jobless friend who has a mysterious source of income.

So where is this mysterious source of income coming from? If the goal of the movie was to reintroduce MCU Spider-Man as a stripped back character that sticks closer to the roots of the character in the comics (a broke-ass bum who can't pay rent), why didn't they drop even a token line about how Peter makes money? There's gotta be a modern equivalent of selling photos of yourself to newspapers.

I think it would have actually been a really good opportunity for the movie to demonstrate it's characterization of Peter Parker as someone who's neglecting his civilian life in favor of his superhero one if Peter is shown constantly funneling all of his income into his Spider-Man costumes and gadgets and not taking good care of himself. His apartment is way too clean and well-kept and he never worries about rent at all a single time in the movie.

My problem is not that Spider-Man has access to high tech. This character has always been a gadgeteer from the very start. It's that he has unexplained access to some infinite source of wealth that makes it easy for him to live a downright cushy life despite financial troubles being key to most characterizations of his character.

Superhero worlds pretty much exist in perpetual stasis where the heroes get to experience, deal with, and be affected by the fantastical elements present in the world, but none of those fantastic elements ever affect the world itself in any meaningful ways. The world of DC and Marvel is just our world with a few fantastical add-ons. The lifestyle of normal people in these worlds are hardly different. These fantastical elements don’t feel like organic parts of the world, because they don’t realistically interact with or affect the “regular world”.

A common example is scarcity of resources. There are so many heroes, technology, powers, gods and spirits, magic, etc. that have the ability to fundamentally change how people live.

Gadget based superheroes like Iron Man have proprietary technology that could transform the world and kick off an energy/tech revolution. But aside from them personally using that tech to fight crime, that technology isn’t seen or used or even talked about in a normal, non hero context.

Or take magic users. They’re numerous and even the ones that aren’t particularly strong in their craft could affect the world in a meaningful way. Even jobber spell casters could do everything from starting a shipping business where they cut travel time through portal spells, or doing minor medical and cosmetic services (a simple spell to get rid of acne, or fix a sprained ankle, or even change the color of your hair without having to use dye) would be an inconsequential but realistic outcome of this kind of power being accessible regular people.

Aliens also exist and are publicly known about in these superhero worlds too right? The indisputable confirmation doesn’t change anything about the culture of Earth? The means to travel the galaxy and now the motivation to do so exist in this world. Earth should have become a space faring civilization and alien civilizations should have way more direct and varied forms of contact with Earth than just doing another alien invasion plot.

But by far the most common example is why superheroes or literally anyone else who has access to the fantastical permits the existence of serious injuries and illnesses when they have the power to easily fix those problems. Whenever there’s a storyline about a character becoming injured or falling ill or having to deal with the same happening to their loved ones feels disingenuous because there’s a million and one solutions for it, and just by nature of these interconnected crossover-prone superhero stories, most heroes at least know one guy or one guy who knows a guy who knows a guy that can help them out. There are so many heroes who’d be better serving their communities and making more of a tangible positive difference by working in non-combat roles. Someone with healing powers could save 10 lives for every 1 he saves by punching a mugger in the face. Even if the heroes aren’t the ones doing it, these fantastical powers and technology should be accessible to normal people as well. But we never see anyone using it aside from the heroes and government. There’s no way the corporate capitalist world that we live in (reflected in the comics) wouldn’t try to harness and monetize the various fantastical elements of the world and sell it a commodity. But we barely ever even get that.

Actually now that I think about it, this is just a common problem with all urban fantasy world-building, but even worse in the case of superhero settings, because they don’t try to make a secret world or some clear divide between the fantastical and normal worlds that keep them from interacting.

The plot might be predictable and the secret villain reveal is the least surprising twist in the franchise, but if the movie has any strong ideas at all, it’s the message that Air Bending does not equal Air Nomad.

The entirety of the film is Aang trying to look for a shortcut to revive Air Nomad culture by physically bringing the power of Air Bending back into the world using spirit magic.

It’s in the title: The Last Airbender. Aang is so hung up on this idea of not being the last Airbender that he fails to realize that Air Bending isn’t the end all be all of Air Nomad culture. This is expounded on repeatedly by the movie through the characters of Tagah and the Denied. Tagah is an Airbender from thousands of years in the past, not just a hundred like Aang. It’s clear that despite nominally sharing the same cultural roots and bending style, Tagah isn’t really an “Air Nomad” because he predates the creation of Air Nomad culture. Back in his day, they were the Air Empire. Just being an Airbender doesn’t immediately instill in someone the values of Air Nomad culture.

Bending is just a system of magic powers, they don’t have any inherent connection to the philosophies and morals of a society. Air Bending in the original series is described as avoidant and using your opponents momentum against them. We see in the movie that that style of bending is just a cultural practice of the Air Nomads, not an inherent trait of Air Bending. Tagah uses Air Bending offensively and in brutal displays of power, and it’s not portrayed as a “wrong way to bend” or a less powerful technique like how Zuko’s anger based Fire Bending was portrayed. Air Bending didn’t make the Air Nomads peaceful and conflict avoidant, the Air Nomads’ pacifist philosophy made Air Bending passive and avoidant.

An even better example the movie uses is the Denied. They’re anti-bender terrorists who Tagah grants the power of Air Bending to, turning them all into Airbenders. They use that power to continue their rampage for power and authority until they get it stripped from them at the end of the movie. Even if Aang succeeded and Tagah didn’t betray him for the magic staff, Aang wouldn’t have been able to rebuild Air Nomad culture by just bringing back Air Bending because there’s a difference between being an Air Bender and an Air Nomad. Air Bending is a genetic trait/spiritual power, not a culture.

This leads to the conclusion of the film, where Aang realizes this himself and shatters the staff, taking away the possibility of using spirit magic to bring back Air Bending. A lot of people critiqued this as tying up loose ends in order to not decanonize Legend of Korra, and while that is partially true, it also makes sense for Aang’s character arc in the film.

There’s a really poignant line towards the end of the movie from Aang where he says this:

“I don’t know if Airbending will ever return. But I know now that the true power of the Air Nomads was never their bending. It was their lives. And that’s a power I can pass on to others.”

This is why, at the end of the film, Aang starts training the Air Acolytes, people without the power to Air Bend but are willing to practice and embody the lifestyle and culture of the original Air Nomads. It makes a lot of sense why Aang initially believed Air Bending was synonymous with being an Air Nomad and that Air Nomads could never exist again without the return of Air Bending, because Aang was raised in a culture where every single person was allegedly a Bender. This movie did a really good job at breaking down that mentality and showing Aang that a culture can live on through non-benders as well. After all, that’s pretty much how it is for the other three nations. Most people in the Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, and Water Tribes are not benders. It’s only a tiny minority who are, but it’d be crazy to say that those Nonbenders aren’t true Fire Nationers, Earth Kingdom citizens, and Water Tribesmen. A culture is more than its fancy magic system.

This brings me to my biggest gripe with what Legend of Korra did with airbenders and Air Nomad culture. In Legend of Korra, thanks to some more spirit magic nonsense called Harmonic Convergence, Air Bending returns to the world again, permanently this time. Lazy implementation aside (Korra has a ton of these spirit ex machina moments that I think are poorly implemented), this just feels like a weaker message than what the Legend of Aang movie tried to tell in regards to the revival of Air Nomad culture. Bending is only a tiny fraction of what makes Air Nomads who they are. The idea that Air Nomad culture couldn’t truly return until thousands of random people were granted Air Bending out of nowhere feels kinda screwy. Is Air Nomad culture really that inaccessible to Nonbenders? Can you not participate in this culture unless you’re one of the elite few gifted with magic powers by the spirit gods?

Harmonic Convergence undoes so many of the interesting ideas and themes surround the original show’s most mature and nuanced topics. The genocide of the Air Benders looms large over the entire series and there were so many stories you could have told with it. The scars of war don’t fade that easily and I feel like it would have been kneading to see a restored Air Nomad culture that didn’t have a majority bending population. Having all that thrown out the window with a supernatural power-gifting event instead was the cheapest way the Air Nomads could have been restored.

In 100 Girlfriends Who Really Really Love You, the main character is told by the God of Love that due to a clerical error, he has 100 soulmates, not just the one that normal people get. He must date all 100 of his soulmates or they’ll be cursed with lethal misfortune and meet some untimely end.

This is a comedy, borderline parody, series though. Why even build in this weird Final Destination-esque clause in the central gimmick of the series? As an in-universe motivation for the main character to actually date all 100 girls because he has no choice? The way the main character is written, he would have gladly dated all 100 anyway even without the certain death clause so it just feels superfluous. If you really wanted to add some consequence to the main character failing to win over a soulmate, wouldn’t the threat that they’ll potentially never find true love (since he’s their one and only soulmates) be motivation enough?

The “you need to have her join your harem or she’ll die” element of the story is not only redundant but it also completely warps the tone of the story. I have no idea why the author decided to throw in such a weirdly morbid element into what is basically a shitpost about how absurd harem romcoms are.

The Electro that appears in No Way Home is supposed to be the same exact Electro that appears in Amazing Spider-Man 2.

The Electro in Amazing Spider-Man 2 is such an interesting take on the character. He’s basically an unhinged super fan of Spider-Man with severe self-esteem issues. He’s under-appreciated, overlooked (in deleted scenes it’s shown that even his own mother forgot his birthday) and generally treated like he’s invisible. Even after Electro gets his powers and goes off the rails as a full blown Supervillain, Jamie Fox’s Electro is still played with a lot of nuance to his character. Even at his strongest, he still seems like an insecure guy overcompensating, not a charismatic and self-assured superhuman.

No Way Home has this character returning as one of the multiversal villains pulled in by Dr. Strange’s spell, but the way the character is written and performed is such a stark departure from the original depiction in Amazing Spider-Man 2 that it might as well be a brand new character.

This character is just Jamie Fox playing Jamie Fox, not Max Dillon. Even the way the character looks is literally just Jamie Fox. In ASM2, Max Dillon’s human form is this bed-raggled looking guy with bad hair and a normal build. In No Way Home, Max inexplicably gets his human body back and has an immaculate line-up and is absolutely yoked. I didn’t know getting transported to the MCU dimension also came with a free haircut.

Even if you look past the appearance, they clearly don’t act or speak like the same character. The lines that come out of No Way Home Electro’s mouth would never be said by ASM2 Electro. He acts like the stock tough guy persona that Jamie Fox is used to playing in every action blockbuster project. His performance as Electro in No Way Home is more reminiscent of his Django from Django Unchained than Max Dillon in Amazing Spider-Man 2.

What even was the point of bringing this character back if he’s going to look, act, and talk like a completely original character? The only two characters that feel like they have continuity between No Way Home and their original films are the three Reimi era villains (Goblin, Ock and Sand-Man). Lizard is barely a character and is reduced to a CGI monster but that’s a whole other rant.

Wonder Woman gets basically nothing from DC outside of her comics, which means her iconic roster of villains shouldn’t be getting any screentime either right? Nope, Wonder Woman’s rogues gallery are enjoying more prominence and appearances in non-comics media more than ever before in their history; just as the enemies of other heroes, not Wonder Woman. Between shows like Harley Quinn and My Adventures with Superman, more Wonder Woman villains have made their DEBUT appearances outside of comics as the enemy of another superhero than they have with Wonder Woman.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Giganta has never had an animated appearance in a DC property until MAWS season 3, which means her debut appearance outside of comics was a SUPERMAN villain. Giganta isn’t even a C-lister in Wonder Woman’s rogues gallery, she’s one of her staple villains. This is like if Bane made a debut appearance as the villain of a Flash animated story. MAWS isn’t content with poaching just one Wonder Woman villain, they double dip by having Dr. Poison be the main antagonist of an episode later on in the season. MAWS season 3 still has a few episodes left, makes me wonder if they’re going to score a hat trick and introduce yet another Wonder Woman villain before the end.

Cheetah is pretty much the only prominent member of Wonder Woman’s rogues gallery that regularly appears alongside her. Those other villains are cheating whores, Cheetah is the only woman loyal to Diana.

Scene takes place about 30 minutes into the episode. Ormund basically spends the whole scene implying with the subtlety of a sledgehammer that Gwayne is gay and likes men.

>Gwayne: "I have marched a long road, fought and killed, and suffered my comrades to be killed about me."

Ormund: "Yes, you have endured much. (Brief pause) I'm sure you found solace with some of your brothers in arms."

Implication: "I bet you were having sex with your men."

This is swiftly followed up with this absurd line from Ormund:

>(Addressing Daeron) "Make sure [Gwayne] bathes. Oh, and... mind yourself. Backs against the wall. (while miming covering his behind with both hands)"

Implication: "Don't drop the soap, Daeron."

Yeah, this freak actually said that to his own nephew about his own brother.

This is the most comically unsubtle way to hint that a character might be gay that I've ever seen put to screen. If there was any room for doubt about which way Gwayne's sword swings, bury it now because apparently there is no doubt in Ormund's mind.

He basically hit Gwayne with the homophobic 1-2 punch of "I bet you're fucking all your male friends" and "I bet you want to groom young boys" in this scene. I'm surprised Ormund didn't slip in a slur in there at any point.

I know this is technically in-character for Ormund as the religious fundamentalist final boss, and the original Game of Thrones (and book series) weren't much subtler about characters being gay, but Ormund shooting off these bigot quips randomly at the end of a serious dialogue honestly threw me for a loop. I feel like there had to have been a less overt way for Ormund to judge his brother than saying every homophobic line in the playbook.

Avengers Endgame ends with the Avengers bringing back about 4.5 billion people back to life in an instant after they were all killed in an instant 5 years ago. In those 5 years, society nearly collapsed, people mourned, the world fundamentally changed and the remaining 4.5 billion had to pick up all the pieces without any hope or expectation that their dead loved ones will ever come back to life.

So how is this the same world in which Peter Parker gets to go on a normal high school summer trip to Europe just 8 months later, where there is basically zero indication that the Snap ever even happened aside from a few funny token moments about the legal drinking age? People are flying like normal, going on vacation like normal, apparently all of Europe instantly recovered its devastated economy, the population crisis of literally billions of people being displaced was somehow solved, and every single tourist destination is apparently ready and open to take on visitors.

Our world took longer to go back to normal after the COVID pandemic, and that didn't last 5 years and kill half the population like the Snap did (not to mention everyone who died from the pandemic didn't magically come back to life at the end of it).

And when they tried to walk this back with Falcon & the Winter Soldier, by showing that the world does actually have a shit ton of lingering issues from the Snap, it just made Spider-Man No Way Home's portrayal worse because now there's two directly contradictory portrayals of the post-Endgame world. For a while now, the MCU has been stumbling face-first into replicating how messy and snarled the Marvel comic book canon is. This is the kind of thing that makes me unsurprised at the rumors of Marvel angling for a universe-reset after Avengers Doomsday, just like the comic events like Secret Wars that came before it.

Promare’s main villain, Kray Foresight, is a tech CEO who wants to open a wormhole and travel to another galaxy’s planet to colonize it, with his stated motivation being to flee an apocalyptic volcanic eruption that would doom the Earth in 6 months. To do this, he has to use human beings as fuel for his warp engine, and he’d basically be abandoning billions of people as his Noah’s Ark ship only has room for 10,000 passengers.

At face value, this sounds like a somewhat nuanced motivation and goal. Sacrifice many to guarantee the survival of the few in an apocalypse scenario. We’ve seen villain motivations like this before. Whenever we get a story like this though, it always frustrates me that the protagonists only criticize the method, not the core motivation itself. It’s almost like the story and the protagonists tacitly agree with the villain that there’s no other way and only object on moral grounds instead of pointing out that there’s many other solutions and the villain is full of shit. Luckily, Promare defies this trope with gusto.

During the final fight, Kray Foresight busts out a giant mech to fight the protagonists’ own giant mech (it’s a Studio Trigger anime) and his mech is armed with advanced technology that he claims he’ll use to terraform the new planet he and his chosen few will migrate to. First is a laser cannon that can reduce mountains to fine dirt, which Kray says will help create farmland on the new planet. Next is a giant piledriver that can drill through almost any amount of bedrock, which Kray claims will help with accessing underground sources of water on the new planet. Finally, an absolute zero freeze beam that can instantly extinguish any flame and cool any surface instantly, which Kray says will guard against solar flares on the new planet.

If you haven’t put together the irony yet, don’t worry, the protagonists have you covered. They immediately call Kray out on his bullshit by pointing out that every single piece of technology he just used to fight them could have been used to solve the volcanic eruption issue that supposedly necessitated the migration plan in the first place. With every new weapon Kray brings out, the protagonists ask him why he didn’t just use that incredibly powerful tech to solve the volcano issue, and Kray rebukes with some paper thin excuse as to why that wouldn’t work. Kray claims he considered every other options before settling on the interstellar colonization plan but it’s clear that he never actually considered using his hyper advanced technology to just fix Earth’s problems. He doesn’t want to migrate because there’s no other way to save humanity, he just always personally wanted to migrate to another planet to begin with. Earth’s imminent destruction just became a convenient excuse for him to finally pull the trigger.

Kray Foresight is such a in-your-face social commentary on the real-life lobby of interplanetary colonization that I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone else draw the connection yet. There’s loads of real life Kray Foresights who are obsessed with colonizing other planets in order to flee Earth and its problems, tech CEOs and other wealthy oligarchs who pour trillions of dollars into crackpot technology and schemes while ignoring the obvious and straightforward solution to Earth’s climate crisis, which is using that money to confront it head on. Just like Kray, they prefer space colonization over environmental preservation and restoration because actually fixing Earth’s problems is going to be messy and require effort and hard work. They dress up their glib dream of living on a private planet free of the mess of Earth as an altruistic mission to “preserve the future of humanity”. Just like Kray, they don’t actually care about the future of humanity, they just want to run away from issues that they themselves played a part in creating.

What I love about Promare and pretty much any other original work by Studio Trigger is that they’re literally that one quote about how authors who use subtext are all cowards. None of these stories are shy about the messages and themes they’re trying to communicate, and this one is a particularly relevant one for the current times.

In fiction, whenever a character has a backstory of being the offspring of two disparate species, it’s universally a positive thing. They might have special powers, they might be as strong or even stronger than the two species their parents belong to, they can access certain technology or magic or skills, etc. There’s almost no drawbacks and biologically speaking, it’s mostly a net positive. All of their character conflict comes from social factors, not their hybrid genetics.

In reality though, hybrid offspring are usually fucked up in some way. While there are hybrid animals that have beneficial traits that give them advantages over their parents (like mules being hardier than both donkeys and horses or ligers growing larger than both tigers and lions) just like in fiction, but unlike in fiction their special traits aren’t all positive. Most hybrids are sterile and can’t reproduce, for example. Some hybrids have rare genetic disorders and other undesirable traits that don’t make them some perfect mix of only desirable genetic traits.

I wish there were more fictional hybrid characters who actually suffered more than social consequences from being born the mix of two separate species. I feel like it opens up the door to so many juicy drama. Maybe the character almost resents their parents, or have unique hangups stemming from their unique biology and the ramifications that has on their life. You could also do some interesting things with the social angle, since most fictional settings have some pre-established stigma around hybrids. If there’s actually some basis around why they’re called abominations and taboo, then the whole “my existence is a curse” arc carries more weight.

One piece of media that actually did this really well is Dungeon Meshi, which makes for such a good example for subverting fantasy tropes that it’s almost cheating to mention it. This is kind of a big spoiler for a main character’s backstory so read ahead with caution. >!Marcille, who everyone assumes is just a regular elf, is revealed to be a half-elf about 3/4 of the way into the story. What makes Marcille’s half-elf backstory interesting and unique as opposed to the laundry list of other half-elf characters in contemporary fantasy is that she actually has loads of drawbacks from being born as a hybrid. In Dungeon Meshi, a half-elf’s lifespan is actually double that of a regular elf’s lifespan, which is 500 years, living up to 1000 years. Elves are by far the longest lived race in the setting so this means she’ll outlive literally every other character in the story by centuries. This actually reflects a real life phenomena seen in hybrid animals where their lifespans are significantly longer than either of their parent species. She also had an erratic maturation rate growing up, resulting in her remaining a toddler for decades while her human father aged and eventually died before she even learned to properly walk. This also diverges from most popular depictions of half human hybrids in fiction, where they basically get to age like normal even if the other parents’ species has a completely different growth rate compared to humans. And finally, like most real life hybrid animals, Marcille is sterile; which means her long, lonely life can’t even be alleviated by raising offspring who would share her lifespan. All this combines to create a half-elf existence that would actually be horrific to live as, unlike the net positive stat buff it would be in most other fantasy settings.!<

One line from Rhaenyra that really stood out to me from Episode 4 was when she point blank told Ulf that he belongs to the crown and basically told him to stay in the Red Keep like a good dog.

People love to call Ulf privileged and spoiled, but this moment is one of the most naked displays of Targaryen entitlement put on display in the show and it's astonishing that most people side with Rhaenyra instead of Ulf and the other Dragonseeds.

Ulf isn't treated like a respected knight and ally, he's treated like a slave soldier. His only value to the crown is as a disposable pilot for Rhaenyra's dragons. The knighthood Rhaneyra gave these three men are a complete sham, she might as well have put them in chains. They have no privileges, no lands, no titles, Rhaenyra can't even find Hugh's wife a house. They're expected to die for her with a smile on their faces while being given nothing in return. That's not service, that's slavery.

Notice how Ulf is not even allowed to ride his own dragon whenever he wants, only when Rhaenyra needs him to fly as her human weapon. This is a privilege every other Targaryen gets to have, but no the dragonseeds. Rhaenyra and Daemon almost act like the Dragonseeds' dragons are on loan to them instead of being bonded to each other.

Many viewers seem to have this misconception that Rhaenyra "gifted" dragons to them like she wrote them a charitable check. Rhaenyra didn't give them anything, they all put their own lives on the line to claim dragons while Rhaenyra risked nothing. Those aren't "the crown's dragons" they're the Dragonseeds' dragons.

The show never even frames Rhaenyra's treatment of the dragonseeds in a positive light, it's pretty explicitly shown as a failing of Rhaenyra, both politically and morally. That's why it's extra baffling to me that most people's takeaway from these scenes is "Know your place Ulf".

Marvel comics operates on a sliding timeline, where real world events are fixed points in time but in-universe occurrences and character backstories and ages shift forwards in time to ensure the characters never age too much to be unprofitable or become incompatible with the “world outside your window” gimmick Marvel comics has made into a core part of their brand identity.

For example, Spider-Man will perpetually be aged somewhere between his mid 20s to early 30s. The character was introduced in 1962 but he’s still in his 20s-30s and not 64 years old because Marvel has moved up his timeline as real world time has passed. Spider-Man will now have been born sometime in the late 90s up to 2000, in order for his age of mid 20s to make sense. Spider-Man is (for now) a zoomer.

Obviously the downsides of this is obvious. So many aspects of Marvel character who have had backstory elements or important in-universe events tied to fixed historical moments now no longer make sense after the timeline slid forward. Spider-Man’s bully Flash Thompson fought during the Iraq War and lost his legs, eventually becoming Agent Venom because of it. The war started in 2003, so even if we generously highball Flash Thompson’s age to early 30s (birth year 1993 to make his age 33) he’d still be 10 years old when the Iraq war started and be barely 18 when it ended in 2011, nowhere near old enough to have actually served. Marvel will have to come up with a new war for him soon, just like how they shifted Punisher’s backstory from being a Vietnam War vet to an Afghanistan War vet.

I think the funnier side effect is on the actual child characters who are forced to maintain a young age over decades of publication history without aging a single year. Like Franklin Richards son of Reed and Sue Richards, debuted in 1968, and has been roughly 10-13 for the last 58 years. Franklin is still that young kid to this day, which means logically, he’d be exposed to modern childrens’ entertainment trends. When Franklin was first born in the comics, he wouldn’t even have a gameboy at age 10, but in the modern day he’s now in the exact age demographic that enjoys internet brainrot.

Just imagine this little chud Franklin sitting in front of the Fantasta-Flatscreen TV and giggling away at Italian Brainrot before gesturing 67 at Doom and using his reality warping powers to summon in Tung Tung Tung Sahur from the AI Slop Universe (Earth-67676767) and having him beat Doom to a pulp. Fortnite is basically the aftermath of a Franklin Richards fight.