WandaVision started out good, at the start she was clearly the villain, but then they were too much of a bunch of cowards to go through with it so they include this horrendous villain of the week and "redeemed" Wanda by making her remove the spell she put everyone under. Oh and of course they made the cop guy go turbo evil, actually laughed out loud when he attempted to just fucking shoot the kids on the spot.
And then they even had the gall to make this other character say "They'll never know what you sacrificed for them." I wanted to scream. She "sacrificed" the fantasy world she created purely for herself for which she enslaved hundreds of actual people. Holy shit that was aggravating.
“redeemed” Wanda by making her remove the spell she put everyone under
There's literally nothing wrong with CIA propaganda!
I wouldn't even mind her being redeemed, generally speaking. If the show had shown more seriously what she had done, shown her regret her actions and try to make things right somehow by helping the people she wronged.
But good lord was that a bizarre ending.
Thanos kills half of all the plant and animal and micro life needed to sustain the remaining half of sentient life he's trying to keep from over conusming the universe. Immediately recreating the precarious situation he sought to fix by doing the worst thing possible.
Infinity war is great. That Thanos cannot conceive of another solution is capitalist realism and shows how sick and stupid Thanos (the anthropomorphosised technocratic capitalist death cult) is. Where they dropped the ball is the sequel where they defeat thanos by punching instead of showing him an alternative to capitalism is possible.
That Thanos cannot conceive of another solution is capitalist realism
Thanos isn't the embodiment of capitalism, he's the embodiment of Hitlerism. An ideology so intrinsically evil that the protagonists are justified in doing literally anything (including their own mini-genocides, desecrations, and nightmare science projects) to stop him.
Capitalism is embodied by the character of Tony Stark, the billionaire arms dealer ubermensch who becomes the Epic Martyr who we are expected to venerate forever. Stark's martyrdom complex echoes through the show pretty much from the beginning. Whether he's sacrificing his fortune to do Super-Charity or sacrificing his love life to do Super-Adventuring or sacrificing his physical body to do Super-Nuclear-Bomb-Throwing or sacrificing his property to stop The Scary Foreign Terrorists or finally throwing away his life to save reality itself, he is the embodiment of capitalism - the Bourgeoise Messiah who Died So That Capitalism Can Live.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a hagiography for the financial elites. Of course it's not going to present you with an alternative to capitalism. It's salvation is rooted in Capitalism.
The worst part:
In our cursed, stupid society, this dumbass motive exists to create a "complex" villain.
As in people think it's KIND OF A GOOD IDEA
marvel movies are like listening to a five year old tell a story they're making up on the spot
yes thank you, that's what I was thinking of but couldn't remember the name
https://axecop.com/
Renegade Cut had a pretty cool video on this.
And yeah. The movie is so fucking dumb. Like there are magical rocks that can affect the universe and they present him with a trolley problem where he can literally remove the trolley.
And don't even get me started on the ending:
spoiler
He wins and eliminates half the universe, including some big-name characters. It's an easily reversible soft death that gets resolved in the next movie. But seeing the audience freaking out fucking broke me.
Like they're not going to seriously change the status quo when they have a shit ton of movies to squeeze out. But yeah, the stakes are totally real.
I thought that was a great ending tbh. It was certainly effective at getting a reaction.
Maybe I'm just being edgy. As a standalone film, I think the ending would feel impactful to me. But since it's a part of a larger franchise, I couldn't quite forget that. I'll say that affected my ability to enjoy the movie.
Yeah, while watching it never once did I think "oh no, they're gone" so much as "I wonder how this plot gets resolved in the next movie"
Well yeah, which of course keeps it true to its comic book roots.
Still funny watching everyone have a meltdown because the characters “died”
It does hit a little harder in a movie than it would in a TV show or comic, because we aren’t as used to a movie being so serialized.
This movie spawned a huge group of people who initially started out parroting ironic memes about how Thanos was right. Over the years I believe those memes have become less and less ironic. In a few hundred more years, there will be a history textbook mentioning this in a footnote within the chapter on ecofascism.
Even if you think controlling population is the only solution, Thanos' solution is just so brain dead. Recovering from being reduced to 50% population happens pretty fast, so he's gonna have to keep doing genocide one or two times each century probably.
Thanos doesn't understand how math or demography work at a fundamental level.
The urge to give certain characters cartoonishly evil agendas and personalities helps rationalize the "Do everything it takes to win" narrative that serves to churn out dramatic action sequences.
Thanos doesn’t understand how math or demography work at a fundamental level.
They could have conceivably massaged the plot to make the scheme seem more rational. I'm reminded of the civilization-wide sterilization inflicted on the one race in Mass Effect that nearly runs it to extinction. But the movie was drawn out enough before tossing in an intro class on second derivative population growth rate.
But all of it ultimately just boils down to the need for another glorious reenactment of World War 2. Epic-scale fantasy media seems fixated on this singular point in history. One in which the primal urge to kill on a planetary scale was unleased by globe-spanning empires, and the movie's host country emerged victorious.
You can't do a WW2 fantasy reenactment without a Holocaust. So of course you need Intergalactic Hitler as your final boss.
I have no doubt they're going to do the same soy-banter le-mega arc into a climactic battle with Galactus over the next five or ten years, and for the same reasons.
I found a big brain medium about Infinity War: https://medium.com/@navalevarun/thanos-and-the-unsolvable-trolley-problem-56f23f8c03fb
With gems like: "Just can’t keep going on, he thought, something must change. But who changes it? Should the natural process of over population and over consumption be left to it’s own accord and let it fix itself? -No, Thanos argued. He did not believe in the invisible hand. He did not correlate to the same school of thought as Adam Smith did"
"Thanos believed that in order to achieve balance in the universe, he had to take control over it. Reminds you of Light Yagami from Death Note? Yes, pretty much, isn’t it!"
"P.S: Just don’t watch the Netflix remake of Death Note (they screwed it up!). Wubba-lubba-dub-dub!"
the-unsolvable-trolley-problem
hey I've got a solution for you dorks :gui-better:
P.S: Just don’t watch the Netflix remake of Death Note (they screwed it up!)
Even the original went off the rails and flopped
spoiler
after the killed off L
That's before you work through all the weird incel energy that permeated the middle episodes.
Wanting to kill people to impress Death was a pretty stupid set up but honestly it would have been light years better than this shit.
I mean that was essentially my head-canon the entire time and it doesn't detract from infinity war/endgame's plot lmao
It's the product of a culture in which capitalism has attained total cultural hegemony. A culture where left-wing ideas are, to most people, literally unthinkable.
His GotG design was perfect and that god damn baby face just reminds me that they tried to make an ecofascist into a sympathetic villain.
Not to be "that guy", but that specific detail has, indeed, been pointed out and poked fun at alot, by both fans and haters alike.
