I would categorize the fandom’s issue with the wedding being twofold: first, that writers would use the marriage between Kitty and Colossus to avoid ever having to address Kitty’s bisexuality, and the deeply emotionally intimate (if not canonically physically intimate) relationships she’s had with Rachel Grey and Illyana Rasputin (which has got to be a source of awkwardness, given her role in the proceedings). At the same time, it’s not like bisexual people don’t get married to opposite-sex partners, but it’s rare for writers to tackle that and do a decent job. (I believe @elanabrooklyn has some more thoughts on this.)
Another reason is that Kitty and Piotr’s relationship has always been a rather rocky one, as the comic itself notes, and leaving aside the fact that Kitty began pursuing the relationship when she was 13 and Piotr was 19, it’s been marked by Piotr dumping Kitty via editorial mandate back during Secret Wars, and recently(ish) him getting very creepy with her when he was possessed by the Phoenix Force:
That’s not to say that they’re the only comics couple with issues, but there hasn’t exactly been a lot of time where the two of them have had a chance to work out these issues and demonstrate some real passion and chemistry. Which made the whole thing feel very editorially-mandated.
And then we get to the switcheroo: Kitty gets cold feet literally with the ring being slid on her finger and phases into the ground, which is a VERY soap opera-y way to do it. (To be honest, I feel like the event would have landed better if there had been better build-up where we see Kitty having second thoughts all the way through.) At the same time, there’s nothing very concrete about why she gets cold feet, and her bisexuality remains unmentioned.
…And then Rogue and Gambit get married instead, which I love as an idea, especially since it’s in the wake of the x-cellent Rogue & Gambit miniseries by Kelly Thompson in which Remy and Anna Marie processed a lot of continuity in a way that made me believe in the relationship in a way I hadn’t in years, and iit’s leading into a new series written by the same Kelly Thompson in which Rogue and Gambit are going to do married heist shenanigans in space, which is what this couple should have been doing for a long time if comics writers were less relationship-phobic.
The switcheroo does feel a bit abrupt, and I wonder if it woudln’t have worked better if they’d been a bit more experimental with time and sequence, showing us a happy wedding but also these two couples intersecting, one coming closer together and another drifting apart, but kept us in the dark as to which were which. Also, the speed at which Colossus and Kitty make up and just smoothly pivot to marrying off their friends doesn’t feel genuine.
That being said, I loved the background stuff: the fun interactions between the Jeans and Rachel, Lockheed’s +1, and Storm providing for perfect weather in full gown.
TLDR: the whole wedding storyline seems a bit of a bust, but the silver lining is we get more great Rogue and Gambit stuff.
So over the past couple of issues, especially once we got the Rules, something’s been bothering me about how the “children” work, specifically their identities. And this got me thinking…
See, we’ve had a few cases (1923 Set, 2014 Amaterasu and Morrigan, 2014 Ananke, I’m probably forgetting a bunch) where the "children” claim to remember things from previous incarnations, or who have a strong connection to their assigned god (2014 Sakhmet, for one). But then again, we’ve had other cases where the “children” either don’t know their god (Tara) or reject their god (Baphomet/Nergal), or who are lying about their identity (Baal, Baphomet, Woden). And Baal has manifested both electricity and fire, i.e both Hadad and Hammon.
So does it matter who the specific god is? And this brought up some other doubts: if the Game/Story goes back 6,000 years, why are we calling the two women in #34 Ananke and Persephone, when those names wouldn’t exist for another thousand years at least? Why is Lucifer in the Pantheon, when Lucifer/Satan doesn’t go back nearly that far? And why the crazy mix of pantheons?
And this got me thinking about something from Volume II:
Robert Graves’ whole thing was about syncretism: his thesis in the White Goddess was that there were certain pan-cultural deities who span millenia and huge distances under different names, chiefly the Maiden/Mother/Crone Goddess he associated with the waxing/full/waning moon. And Graves was deeply influenced by James Frazer’s Golden Bough, which did much the same thing with the idea of the dying-and-rising god he associated with Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus, Adonis, and Jesus Christ.
This could explain all of these issues: Ananke isn’t literally Ananke, nor is Minerva literally Minerva. Rather they are Crone and Maiden, just as Persephone isn’t actually Persephone but Mother. Baal isn’t either Baal, he’s all the Baals. It doesn’t matter who Cameron says he is, because all he needs to be is the underground king to Morrigan’s underground queen. (Which also explains why a Mesopotamian undeworld god is the “spouse” of an Irish war goddess.) Lucifer is in the Pantheon because there are trickster/tempter figures in a lot of religions – I imagine if we’d seen the Lucifer of the 8th or 9th century, they might have been calling themselves Loki instead of anything Christian. Tara is so confused because she’s trying to pin down a specific goddess when she’s actually a broad archetype.
I saw Avengers: Infinity War last night, so I can finally respond to repeated pleas for me to write something about it. Warning that I will go fully into spoilers (including one spoiler/speculation at the very end about Avengers 4) and also that I saw it late last night and am running on not much sleep.
Non-spoilery version: it’s really good (but not perfect), it’s a really daring gamble with the entire cinematic universe thing, although I feel like you’ll get more out of the movie if you’ve seen at least the first Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, at least the first Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Black Panther. (But given that those films made either almost or over a billion dollars each, I’m going to guess that there is a huge audience that has.)
Plot
The basic plot structure is pretty simple – Thanos wants to acquire all six infinity stones so that he can wipe out half the population of the universe in the name of Malthusian economics, and the heroes are racing to try and stop him in a number of ways:
Thor, Rocket, and Groot travel to Nidavellir to forge a weapon that can kill Thanos.
the rest of the Guardians race to Knowhere to find the Aether/Reality Stone before Thanos can take it from the Collector.
Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange try to keep the Eye of Agamotto/Time Stone from Thanos and decide to stage an ambush against Thanos on his home planet of Titan.
and the Vision and Scarlet Witch are attacked by two of Thanos’ goons and Cap and the rest of the Secret Avengers take them to Wakanda to try to remove the Mind Stone from Vision without killing him.
Towards the end of the film, these strands re-integrate as Thor and co. show up to try to save the day in Wakanda, and the rest of the Guardians pursue Thanos to Titan and join in the ambush with Tony and co., and finally Thanos shows up in Wakanda to get the last stone from Vision.
Character Interactions
In part because they’re working with a much larger cast, Infinity War is not as fleet as Civil War was in terms of balancing screen-time and pace so that (almost) every character gets a fully-realized arc. Some characters – Tony, Gamora, Star-Lord, Vision and Wanda – get much more developed arcs than another characters. (I was surprised by how little dialogue Cap gets, for example.)
What the Russo brothers give us instead is an incredible kalleidoscope of character interaction, throwing together different knots of characters so we can see them bounce off eachother – Doctor Strange and Tony Stark’s arrogant-off, Thor palling around with Rocket and Groot (he calls Rocket a rabbit, learned Groot’s language as an elective), Star-Lord’s outrage that Spider-Man doesn’t really think Footloose is the best movie of all time…I could go on forever. When you have ten years of building up a relationship between these characters and the audience, there is an enormous emotional payoff in getting to see all of them react to one another on a scale that’s as big or bigger as that scene from the first Avengers movie.
I do have one critique when it comes to character arcs, which is that this movie undoes a LOT of the work that was done in Thor: Ragnarok – Thor’s refugeed Asgardians are seemingly wiped out, his repaired relationship with Loki is ended by the latter’s death, Thor even gets a new eye and a new axe to replace what he lost in the film. This heightens the already-existing risk of the big tentpoles undermining the individual character movies, and will make it much harder to keep talented filmmakers like Taika Waititi coming back if they feel like their work is being disrespected.
However, as I’ll explain below, I think there are ways of rowing this back.
Thanos as a Character
One of the biggest open questions heading into this movie was whether Thanos would be a worthy enough villain to justify the hype and the stakes of the film. While he’s been a Doctor Claw-style presence from Avengers on, the audience hasn’t really seen Thanos as an active character before. Add to that the difficulty of pulling off a CGI/Mocap villain, which can be done very well or very badly and almost never in the middle.
I would argue they broadly succeeded in a number of areas:
Thanos is a terrifying presence, who manhandles the main characters with ease, shrugs off seeming deaths repeatedly, and only becomes more terrifying as he acquires more stones and generates momentum until by the end where he is a runaway freight train that cannot be stopped.
By leaning heavily on Nebula, Gamora, and Josh Brolin’s weary conviction, emotional intensity, and underplayed charisma, Thanos gets as close as you can get to being a real character when it comes to a universal population control fanatic who’s trying to become god. But by the end of it, you do get the sense of someone utterly determined to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to achieve his ideal.
In terms of plot structure, he’s absolutely the driving force of the film, a clear case of a villain protagonist on a dark version of the well-trod Hero’s Journey-by-way-of-Collection Quest. At every step, he’s one step ahead of the good guys, alternately using brawn, brains, and introspection to achieve his ultimate goal.
His henchmen, by contrast, are pretty disposable, with the exception of Ebony Maw’s evangelical preacher, who gets some semblance of character.
The Snap and the MCU
So let’s talk about the ending: Thanos wins. He collects all the stones despite the heroes coming very close to stopping him, snaps his fingers, and half the universe – including Black Panther, Falcon, Vision, Bucky, Star-Lord, Mantis, Gamora, Drax, Groot, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, Maria Hill, and Nick Fury – suddenly ceases to exist. Even before that happens, Heimdall, Loki, an unknown number of Asgardians, Gamora, and Vision are dead at his hands.
This is the daring gamble I spoke of above the fold. The Russo brothers have blown up a huge chunk of the MCU: a good half of the Avengers, most of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the stars of Black Panther and Spider-Man are gone. And even though on a meta level we know that some people are coming back – there’s a Black Panther 2 and Spider-Man 2 that’s going to happen, Black Widow has her solo movie, etc. – on an emotional level the loss felt real in the moment, and that’s all that matters.
At the same time, Marvel have given themselves a huge number of outs:
Doctor Strange and the Time Stone: there’s a quite prominent narrative trick that happens in the Iron Man/Doctor Strange plot, where Doctor Strange explains at some detail that he will stop at nothing to defend the Time Stone, including abandoning Tony Stark to Thanos. Then Doctor Strange uses the Time Stone to see every possible alternate future to find the one in which Thanos can be defeated. Then, after the ambush fails, Doctor Strange simply hands over the Time Stone to save Tony Stark’s life and, before he himself disintegrates into nothingness, tells Tony that “now we’re in the endgame.” Conceivably, the Time Stone can be used to reset ANYTHING that happened in the film: the fandom seems to be coming around to the idea that this can only reset the people who died as a result of the snap, there’s no reason why one couldn’t go back further.*
Minds Set In Stone: while Gamora and Vision would seem to fall outside of the snap limitation, these two characters have specific outs. In Thanos’ vision, we see the soul of Gamora in the Soul Stone, so it’s quite possible that she could come back through that route. Likewise, Vision’s mind was actively being worked on by Shuri when they were attacked by Thanos’ goon, and it’s quite possible that she might have gotten close enough to separating Vision from the Mind Stone to have downloaded his consciousness or a copy thereof to her wrist computer. (And Vision has a history of reboots and upgrades to his consciousness in the comics…)
Just That Tough: on paper, a LOT of Asgardians died on their refugee ship before or after it was blown up by the Power Stone. However, as we see from Thor’s case, Asgardians are tough enough to survive in the vaccuum of space, so it’s possible that other Asgardians might have survived their wounds and gotten picked up. Heimdall and Loki are a more difficult case: we saw the light go out in Heimdall’s eyes, and although Thanos lampshaded Loki’s habit of faking his death, he could be doing it again. Then again, given the Time Stone, they could hit the reset button on either or both deaths.
So what I find so daring is not just that Marvel is risking fan ire by blowing up their franchise, but that they are about to attempt an in-universe reboot that would theoretically allow them to bring back or leave dead whoever they want in order to produce their preferred new status quo for Phase 4-6. And if they can get the fans to accept that, they can do anything.
***SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS 4:
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
Based on set and casting news about Avengers 4 – Steve Rogers being seen in his Avengers 1 uniform, Thor with his original long haircut, and Cassie Lang (Ant-Man’s daughter) being recast to an older actress from the one playing her in Ant-Man and the Wasp – it’s pretty clear that Avengers 4 will involve extensive time travel both backwards and forwards in time and possibly to alternate timelines. This is why I’m more bullish on the Time Stone being used for more than just reversing the snap.
Luke and Yoda’s burning of the sacred Jedi texts is rather undercut by the fact that Yoda is quite literally fucking with and lying to Luke. Again. You know, for old times sake. Because Yoda almost certainly is 100% aware of the fact that Rey plundered the old texts (and can we get a goddamn holocron up in the movies? Please?) and put them on the Falcon before haring off to go try and redeem Kylo Ren. His last meeting with Luke is therefore predicated on dishonesty and deception in order to manipulate Luke into the proper state of mind, which is, I suppose, classic Yoda.
As for DJ’s being cognizant of the Rebel plans, he gets that intel because he’s listening to Poe and Finn yell at each other over the commlink while he’s hacking the door, and Poe lets slip that information then. It’s really quick and could have been handled better from a writing and cinematography standpoint; but that’s when the relevant information passed to him.
Ironically, Kylo Ren is a better Sith Lord than Vader ever was. He achieved the sine qua non of a successful Sith; he learned everything he could from his master, then killed him and took his place.
I like TLJ, it’s not a bad movie, but… well, to put too fine a point on it, the new trilogy absolutely depends on burning down everything the protagonists of the original trilogy accomplished in order for the new protagonists to accomplish the same things all over again. And that leaves a very, very sour taste in my mouth.
Also, if they’re really committing this strongly to “Luke is a complete failure and doesn’t refound the Jedi Order and when he tries everyone dies” then fuck you for spending four years making me care about Ezra Bridger, Disney. That’s not cool.
Ok, first of all we should probably tag spoilers if we’re not going to keep them below the cut…
My memory might be wrong, but I don’t think it’s possible for DJ(?) to have overheard over the com-link, because Poe didn’t know about the real plan until Leia shuts down the mutiny and knocks him unconscious, right?
I did miss Rey grabbing the old texts, but I don’t think that was the important thing as much as it was about inspiring Luke to reconnect with the Force, reach out to Leia, and save the Rebellion.
Which is why I have a problem with “complete failure.” If my understanding of the reality vs. legend thing: sure, Luke failed Ben, but he ultimately succeeded with Rey (although I would have liked to see her react to Luke’s intervention; that was a weird missing link).
That’s it? (warning mild spoiler, see here for more extensive spoiler) That’s the big reveal that we all had to be patient and wait for over a year for? You have got to be kidding me. EVERYONE GUESSED THAT ALMOST FROM DAY ONE.
But if Marvel’s going to do RedCap/Blue Cap, EvilCap/Good Cap, I demand that they also plagiarize all of the other goofy Superman event ideas: in other words, I want 90s-Teen Cap, CyborgCap, and Laser-Sunglasses Cap.
Actually, I mostly want 90s-Teen Cap, because that would be AMAZING.
I saw GOTG2 this weekend! It was pretty damn good.
Ego’s pretty good. I mean, he’s no Galactus or Celestial or the Fourth World, but he’s a giant planetface and that’s pretty cool.
So some thoughts on GOTG2:
For a sequel that couldn’t change the status quo too much (because the Guardians are going to be in Avengers: Infinity War), I thought it did a good job telling a smaller, intimate story that’s really more about deepening and examining the psychologies of the individual Guardians and their relationships with one another.
And that’s why I have a problem with people saying it was just a retread of the first film, even if they admit that it was just as funny and colorful and surprisingly sentimental as last time. Because the first Guardians movie didn’t really give Gamora and Nebula much character at all, let alone a really moving examination of two people struggling with an abusive childhood; likewise, Yondu in the first film is mostly just a heavy there to be fooled by Peter, whereas in the second film, you get this deep dive into an unexpectedly complicated and compelling person whose loss hits incredibly hard.
Moreover, GOTG2 did a decent job of expanding the world of Guardians: the Spvereign were a great addition to the weird and wacky cosmic world that Marvel is building (and rather than being a throwaway villain, will continue to be significant through their creation of Adam Warlock), Peter’s heritage got revealed and expanded, the culture of the Ravagers was explored in way more detail than I expected (complete with a new team of possible antagonists or allies for the next film who all come out of the original GOTGs), etc.
Because for anyone who believes in the Seven, and indeed the majority of Westerosi do, the Great Sept of Baelor has been the center of the Faith for ~150 years. It’s associated with the closest thing the Faith has to a saint, Baelor the Blessed, who is known to the smallfolk as Baelor the Beloved.
The Red Wedding is an attack on men, albeit one that violates the laws of both gods and men. The destruction of the Great Sept would be an attack on the gods themselves, the most impious action imaginable. And everyone inside is going to be a holy martyr.
As for the consequences, I think they’d be absolutely lethal to the legitimacy of the regime. You’re probably going to see a new revolt of the Faithful, as all of the Poor Fellows and Warrior’s Sons who survive the explosion (and keep in mind, there’s a lot of them out in the Riverlands atm) rise up, probably spearheaded by Bonifer Hasty’s Holy Hundred in command of Harrenhal. And you’ll likely see substantial defections to any alternative monarch.
Jon is King in the North on the same grounds that Robb became King in the North – through right of acclamation as opposed to right of inheritance (since Robb’s father was not King in the North before him). It should be noted, moreover, that King in the North != Lord of Winterfell.
As for him being illegitimate, Lady Mormont spoke for the majority: “I don’t care if he’s a bastard. Ned Stark’s blood runs through his veins.”
Him being a Targ will be a complicating factor, but when the Targaryens land on Westeros with a giant army and three dragons, having a Targ in your corner might not be a bad thing.
The King, the Queen, the Queen’s brother and father, and the High Sparrow all died on the same day and then Cersei became Queen and declared war on her former in-laws. I think people are going to put two and two together.
If what matters is who the closest blood kin of the king is, then the Florents are kin to Princess Shireen and inlaws to Stannis (if you accept that Stannis and Shireen were the lawful kings/heirs to the Iron Throne). Next most recently, the Estermonts are kin to Robert, Stannis, and Renly through Cassana Estermont, regardless of how you see the succession going from that point on. After that, the Targaryens are kin to Robert, Stannis, Renly through Rhaelle Targaryen, as well as to all previous kings.
Cersei’s blood relationship to Robert Baratheon is much more distant than any of those, going back 90 years Gowen Baratheon and Tya Lannister, but even then that pairing died without successful issue, and 120 years ago when an unnamed Baratheon woman married a male Lannister and had issue. It’s highly unclear whether Cersei has any blood connection to Robert.
Now, there is an argument that she’s the mother of Joffrey and Tommen, but…A. their parentage and kingship was publicly put in question and Cersei has already admitted to incest in one case, and B. claims rarely go up the generations in that way, and C. even if the Lannister branch was chosen, Targaryen and Great Council precedent would suggest that a male cousin rather than Cersei herself, would inherit.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 