Author: stevenattewell

Steven, I’m not sure you’ve written on this before… what does an extended period of peace do to the Westerosi social order? How does the nobility dispose of younger sons when they can’t inherit, there’s no standing army for them to join, no war to kill them off, can’t conquer new lands, and there’s prejudice against working at a trade? My understanding is that historically IRL, this state could cause serious problems. Do the Church and the Citadel just get a ton more people sent to them?

Good question!

I mean, in the Westerosi context, there’s still quite a bit of violence and other causes that deals with younger sons – I mean, technically there hasn’t been a fighting war in any of the Dunk & Egg stories, but for all their lighter tone, they have a pretty high body count – tourney deaths, plagues, “pissing contests” between local lords, bandits, stupid coup attempts, etc. 

But in terms of how the social order would react, it’s a bit tricky because an extended period of peace probably also means an extended period of prosperity as well, if only because the opposite tends to intensify resource conflicts and thus lead to war. And prosperity is a great social lubricant. 

When the harvests are good, trade is up, and people have cash on hand and good terms of credit, it’s easier for the social order to deal with surplus kids – get them dowers/dowries to smooth the way for a marriage that wouldn’t have made fiscal sense otherwise, give them jobs around the castle or pay a neighbor to take them off your hands or send them to court, or even set them up as a landed knight or cadet branch if you’re particularly rolling in it. And yes, I imagine you’d see quite an uptick on younger sons and daughters getting sent off to septries and motherhouses with generous donations, as well as an increase in acolytes and novices sent to the Citadel. 

As someone who loves the MCU but is unfamiliar with comic books what makes Mad Bomber so special?

Ah, I got slightly confused there – the Mad Bomber is George

Metesky, a real-life supervillain who set off bombs across New York City for sixteen years before he was caught. 

Madbomb is special for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, it’s Jack Kirby both writing and drawing one of his signature creations, which means you get amazing visuals like this:

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But that’s not all – you also get cameos from Henry Kissinger, a secret 200-year-old Royalist conspiracy to overthrow the U.S government and restore the British Monarchy, Captain America and Sam Wilson having very frank discussions about the linkages between American democracy and slavery, Cap and the Falcon being thrown into the plot of Rollerball (aka “Kill-Derby”), and of course a bomb that can drive people insane. 

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In other words, it’s high-concept superhero action mixed with pop culture references and cultural anxieties of the 1970s mixed with Jack Kirby’s unique Olmec- and surrealist-inspired art. 

And I love it unreservedly. 

How would you characterize the Fantastic Four (both individually and as a group) to someone who first entered the world of comics after Marvel phased them out? What exactly was their niche prior to Secret Wars?

I would tell them that the Fantastic Four were the laboratory of Marvel Comics: they came first, the initial experiment in inter-personal dynamics and flawed characters was exported to the rest of the Marvel Universe (indeed, the idea of the Marvel Universe started there), they were the place where you could explore the weirdest corners of the medium (both in terms of writing and art), and finally they were a font of brilliant characters that could be used outside the FF (Doom, Kang, Galactus, etc. etc.).

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In terms of their individual characters, they fit pretty easily into the four humors model (although man do people love to argue about who fits where): Johnny is a playboy and a prankster, Ben Grimm is depressed and has a hair-trigger temper, Reed is the A-type scientist/leader/authority figure, and Sue Storm holds the universe together. 

Would Dr. Doom work better as an ultimate villain in MCU than Thanos or Ultron?

I love me some Doctor Doom, no question.

In terms of the MCU, I think he hits a nice sweet spot, as I discuss above. You can use him in lots of different kind of stories: he could fit just as easily into a Doctor Strange movie as he could into an Avengers movie or an Iron Man movie, whereas Thanos really only works on the cosmic-sci-fi level and Ultron only works vs. Avengers or component parts thereof. 

Likewise, unlike Thanos who’s obsessed with Death or Ultron who’s obsessed with revenge, Doctor Doom has a more varied range of motives, so you can throw him into most any plot: he’s bound to be interested in any macguffin that promises power, he’s always up for an invasion or conquest, and he loves deeply petty personal grudges. 

Indeed, I would argue that Doom works rather well for an MCU that’s expanding: he could fight the Avengers, he could fight Iron Man, he could fight Spiderman, he could fight Ant-Man, and if Marvel ever gets back the FF…fish gotta swim, Doom gotta fight that fool Richards. 

What do you think of ultron and thanos as villains in the mcu ?

I don’t think Thanos really counts, yet, given that he’s barely been on-screen in the MCU. He’s really more an inciting event/force, albeit a  highly-built-up one. We’ll see in Infinity War whether Marvel pulls off a good Thanos. 

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If you go back and take a second look at Age of Ultron, Ultron himself has some rather good stuff – although you have to pay attention to the AI montage sequences to really grok where he’s going. However, he’s in an overstuffed movie that doesn’t really give him enough time to develop.

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What has historically made Ultron an effective Avengers villain in the comics is that he’s like the Terminator – he keeps coming back after you kill him, and this time he’s made some upgrades, so that rather than decaying as a threat as time goes on, he becomes more of a threat. And while Age of Ultron uses that within the film to a degree with the infected Starkbots through to the Adamantium Ultron, it doesn’t really land with the emotional weight it should have because a billion things are happening at once and there’s no time for anything.

So you don’t really get the atmosphere of increasing tension and danger that you should have, and then by the end of the movie all the Ultrons are gone – which misses the point of the whole Terminator-by-way-of-Frankenstein’s-monster that is Ultron. Perhaps this is because they’d gone all the way up to planet-killing with Ultron and didn’t have any space left to go forward (an argument perhaps that they should have kept Ultron’s ambitions at the level of “kill the Avengers b/c they’re a threat to world peace, also parental rejection issues” as opposed to “glass the planet”). 

Do you think there is something unwritten about Otto Hightower’s ability to form coalitions? I mean he was able to pull the Free cities into the Dance so it would appear that he had the ability to garner beneficial relationships. Otherwise the fact that the Greens were able to keep their coalition together in the face of disaster after disaster in the Dance like that obviously stretches one’s ability to suspend disbelief. You would think it was Rome and its allies up until Hannible at Cannae.

I suppose. On the other hand, one does have to wonder how it is that Otto Hightower, despite being Hand of the King and with a Hightower regent in Highgarden raising Lord Lyonel, couldn’t rally the Reach around his cause, to the point where Oldtown’s forces couldn’t even make it out of the Reach without getting brutalized at the Battle of the Honeywine. 

I think the answer is that the Dance is not one of GRRM’s best-plotted wars/historical events, and relies rather heavily on jobbing to get the greens to lose to the blacks. 

Towards the start of Avengers: Age of Ultron (the movie), the Avengers take turns attempting to lift Thor’s hammer. Obviously most of them fail, but Captain America manages to nudge it. First of all, why is Thor more worthy than Captain America and second, is it possible that Cap noticed that he managed to move it, but decided to fail the test on purpose? Thanks

Well, the moral philosophy of Mjolnir is a rather complicated subject, and not one I’m super-familiar with. 

But…from the research I’ve been able to do, what qualifies one as “worthy” varies a lot from author to author – does it have to do with selflessness and self-sacrifice, or the ideals of ”pure of heart and noble of mind” as understood by the Vikings? Does one have to be a god, or a human, or can a particularly valiant frog/android/other weird thing be worthy?  

Personally, I think the hammer twitch thing was a sign that Captain America will wield the hammer at some future moment – probably going shield-and-hammer against Thanos in Infinity War, if I were a betting man – but is not yet worthy. Which would fit in with the history of Cap and Mjolnir in the comics – whenever he’s wielded it in the past, it’s always been in a moment of supreme crisis, where Cap is stepping up to fight Set or some similarly supernaturally evil being.