Target, MasterCard, power tools, and everything else. I knew a lot of these companies were in bed with each other, but it's a disturbing thought to consider Target as part of the MCU canon.
Target, MasterCard, power tools, and everything else. I knew a lot of these companies were in bed with each other, but it's a disturbing thought to consider Target as part of the MCU canon.
sorry for the essay, but: you know as a kid I really liked Marvel comics because they seemed counter-cultural. I grew up in a small hick town in the south where people believed Pokemon were Satanic and any music outside of bland white stadium country was trash. So I was into X-men, punk music, and Magic: The Gathering because I thought they were enough of a spiritual raft to get myself through living there. I didn't have enough words to even describe why I felt so wrong there, but I knew these Marvel characters fought against injustice and the X-men faced persecution and at least to my 9 year old brain, it felt dangerous reading that stuff. Like I was learning power dynamics and how to open my head to different concepts.
X-men would even gracefully humanize the villains like Magneto (this was when Grant Morrison was head writer) as victims of stubborn pigheaded racism by directly showing him as a holocaust survivor. I know how silly it sounds, but that did resonate with me as a kid. My grandmother would tell me stories about when there were "colored" bathrooms at the local diner, and reading about Magneto was the first time I connected the racist bullshit of my hometown with the extent of how much damage that racism can cause. I'm a privileged first-world moron but I at least tried as a kid, and X-men was the tool available to me. I got mocked at school for reading comics. There was an incident where several bullies ripped an issue of Transmetropolitan out of my hands in middle school and then set it on fire. I got sent to the office and directly accused of Satanism and witchcraft by the vice-principal. Shit was bad, but it at least hardened me to just how poisoned these southern reactionaries are and how deeply disturbing their ideology is.
And now as an adult Marvel movies are everywhere and have gained acceptance as cultural icons. Everyone knows the characters I loved as a kid and I doubt any child now gets bullied for knowing who Dr. Strange is. And yet now Marvel is an aspect of that very same machine that generated the white southern reactionaries of my hometown. They're an integrated cultural and economic force. The most horrifying part for me is learning that Marvel always was part of that same machine and its current acceptance as a cultural force onto itself is simply the mask slipping off and the evil grin revealing itself.
That's a fascinating breakdown of your experience with Marvel and the X-Men in particular.
I am from a conservative area myself, but I learned early on not to share my interests openly. I liked the X-Men because of their persecuted status, but the expanded universe shit was interesting in this case because there was the untold reality they were going through when Captain America and the others did nothing to help mutants except for a couple that were useful to the avengers as an institution. In that way, I started thinking about power dynamics myself. Like you can do crazy superhero shit, but if you're born wrong, the system will use you at best.
I will say I think that what little counter culture that existed in marvel has been scrubbed. You know, the MCU hero uniforms remind me a lot of car interiors like seatbelts. Safe and vaguely colorful, but with deliberate profit motives. The MCU - verse isn't going to have the avengers actually stop a chud unless the chud is directly challenging the status quo.
It's interesting to see the present day and how superhero shit is more overt in the maintenance in the status quo. Anything that breaks from it is seen as political, or forced diversity. The MCU and comic book fiction in general will always be twenty minutes into the future at best. The writers be won't show Storm going :john-brown: on a plantation in the Ivory Coast. Even if that would be amazing to watch. It's sad because I hate that something I liked was actually an effort to sheepdog.
I really liked that one part in Secret Wars as a kid. For context, the villians, the X-Men, and the Avengers are all teleported to an alternate dimension by bored gods who want to watch all the super people do a battle royale. The Avengers try to negotiate with the X-men to join them as a team, but the X-men and Wolverine in particular are deeply mistrustful of the alliance and don't join at first. They only ally later purely out of circumstance and survival, but it's still clearly shaky. They can't trust the representatives of the very instruments of power used to oppress them unless it's absolutely necessary. Good portrayal.
You know, the Fox X-Men movies still had that glimmer of counter-culture too. The mutants are very, very direct queer allegory in the early movies and it's honestly satisfying how the "villains" in the first movie correctly identify cops and politicians as enemies, and also how they're not portrayed as incorrect in that assessment, rather they're portrayed as maybe too willing to resort to aggression. (it's still a liberal movie and product of an imperialist culture afterall. Also the director/writer is unfortunately an abuser.)
I've been readying myself to finally let go of any nostalgic childhood love of the X-men once they're fully integrated into the MCU
I remember the early 2000s movies being cool enough to show complexity. I mean the first movie has magneto turn a senator into a mutant. This far into post-9/11 hellmerica, I'm certain that they wouldn't want to put a message like that out to so many disaffected people.
Also, favorite X-Men character?
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Yeah. They were interesting characters in a setting where most of the persecuted people were pretty and white. It's also (one oh the reasons) why I liked Beast. He was a genius who was treated like a, well, a beast. Though I always hate the way he's written. A bad case of Thesaurus Mouth.
My favorite X-Men character is Rogue, particularly the 90s version. In that phase of her characterization, she had just absorbed the powers of Avenger Ms Marvel, but something happened where she permanently had the powers of super strength, durability, and flight in addition to her power/memory absorption.
So her main power is that by physical touch, she can absorb the powers and memories through someone's skin. Her power has three complications:
She cannot turn it off so she has to wear clothing at all times to avoid absorbing the powers and memories of someone by accident.
Her power hurts whoever she touches. This can be fatal. Her power first manifested as a teenager when she kissed a boy and put him into a coma. The process is akin to taking a person's soul or personality away from their body.
And if that's not enough, her power can hurt herself. Absorbing powers and memories can easily overwhelm her. They can affect her mind, her personality, and her sense of self. She carries the mind of Ms Marvel for some time, with the very real threat that Rogue could be killed or mind wiped from the inside.
To me, Rogue is a walking metaphor for navigating trauma, mental health, invisible disabilities, and loneliness.
She cannot touch others despite desperately wanting to. Her good love interests are characters who try to reach out and be with her even if it's hard. People who want to help her and who are willing to meet her where she's at.
In this time period, she has super strength, flight, and durability. She basically gets the powers of Superman. And due to how gender codes everything, she was coded as less feminine during this period. But the thing was, she didn't want that or see herself as that at all. She had tomboy traits, but because she's not strong and durable all the time, she is treated like her pain doesn't matter as much. Like imagine how fucked up it would be if people stopped reacting to you getting hit by a car. It's like 'yeah, I didn't die, but you didn't even flinch when you saw me roll over the hood of that minivan.' so now not only is it dangerous for people to get close to her, she's seen as needing less help in other areas of her life.
I like stories where Rogue has to come to terms with her powers not working or making it hard to be close to people. I was at disappointed when they took away her Ms Marvel powers and let her control her powers completely. Some things don't have a cure and I thought it would have been cool if she made a romantic relationship work with where she's at.
But her main power is so interesting too. Not only can she copy powers, but she can copy memories and she doesn't get to discard them whenever she wants. Echoes of those thoughts stay with her. To make herself more useful to the people she cares about, she's basically subjecting herself to psychological harm. She's literally making herself go crazy to help the X-Men.
Her character is clever too. She knows all this and then she keeps this in mind when choosing a power to copy for a given situation. Touch Wolverine and she can heal herself but gets anger issues. Touch Nightcrawler and she can teleport but turns blue for a day. Or she can attempt to absorb the current opponent and risk hurting herself or others by doing a lethal drain. If she holds contact for too long, she'll just have a mental copy of her opponent layered over her own mind. If she's not careful, she can take magneto's power and then use it on her friends because that's what magneto would want.
I love characters like rogue and it makes me really sad to see what current writing is doing to characters
Damn. That really got me re-examining Rogue as a character.
i really like her and the goth one from that other show.
not a :libertarian-approaching: i was younger than that one when i was watching it.
I liked her version because they really leaned into her teen angst. The show wasn't perfect, but it was fun. I was probably a similar age as you when the show aired, but my daddy issues drew me to Cool Dad Wolverine.
I always liked Forge, because I thought his ability was more clever and unique compared to the others. He has the ability to put together any technological device he can imagine, even if he doesn't precisely understand the science of it. He can visually intuit how mechanical energy works. He was sometimes used as an explanation for why the X-Men have stuff like lightweight body armor and advanced gadgets, or as a plot device to create some gizmo to save the day. I thought it was cool how they'd use clever scientific ways to solve dangerous situations if brute force didn't seem to work. I also used to think he was a positive portrayal of a native American, but now I'd probably feel differently. He was portrayed as also possessing magic powers and talking to ancestral spirits, or he was good at tracking animals, stuff like that. Stereotypes of how Native people are portrayed in cowboy movies. Runners up are Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler. They're also cool.
Gert and Old Lace aren't X-men but they're my favorite Marvel characters ever, forever
Characters where they actually try explaining how they're smart are really cool to me. Like having the mutant power to reverse engineer an invention in your mind. Forge is so much cooler than say Reed Richards because the only way his power made him smart was using his elasticity to pump more blood to his brain.
That would be so fucking cool. Like just imagining the cinematic power of a scene like that gives me goosebumps.
yeah i was excited in '08 like why the hell is the movie iron man of all people but it was a fun movie and then it all went to hell and comics stuff gradually stopped being for me, the niche nerdy person and became even more commercialized and formulaic than it already was.
death to consumerism. death to neoliberalism.
iron man is probably why I don't drink, because it was genuinely shocking to me as a kid to watch the silly rich robot laser shooty man get plagued by realistic consequences of alcoholism and depression. Got traumatized away from ever touching alcohol, which I guess was the point of the comic. Then the movies come out and it's like uhhh what if Elon Musk had a bazinga robo suit and worked for the DOD
don't worry I read actual books later in my childhood like Dostoevsky and whatever. Death to America please
And that's the sad thing. Art can be helpful and life-changing, but when it's channeled through focus groups and censorship to make it PG-13, you're not going to see an artist actually doing something.
It's alienating a person from their connection to art. I see art as an attempt to understand a person's perspective. I wish I had more of an art critique background, but there's something cool about making something and someone else getting it too.
I meannn....... were they that wrong?
(jk, i would love to see the face of some conservative mofo seeing transmet for the first time though 🤣🤣🤣🤣)