In a sense, the MCU is the greatest adaption of all time. The replication of rebooting/revamping/drawn out wanky nonsense from the comic books in the medium of film was flawless.
Ironically, reboots and retelling the same stories about the same characters is more of a DC thing. Marvel comics are (in)famous for having a single main continuity that treats every story as part of the canon timeline. However, actors age in a way that comic characters don’t.
Yeah the problem with characters being owned by corporations instead of the individual creators is that the IP has to continue to make money no matter what, which leads to well, American super hero comics.
Regrettably there seems to be a significant percentage of the population who are happy to read the same story over and over. Danelle Steel has made her entire career churning out the books over and over, and James Patterson has perfected the model by slapping his name on ghost written books that seem to come out every other month. Tom Clancy’s name is still on books years after his death and there are other thriller authors that are similar, IPs being continued by ghost writers for corporate profit. That’s one reason why companies are all in on AI, the thought of being able to churn out slop for the peasants to buy and consume without having to pay writers gets every CEOs pee pee hard.
Basically the originator of the modern military thriller genre. When Hunt for Red October came out, Tom Clancy was just some rando insurance agent who wrote a book. Basically overnight he launched an entire genre capturing millions of readers including the President and high-ranking military officials. He just kept churning them out and selling millions of copies basically until he died. And of course smart film and game licensing has kept his name relevant far past the cultural zenith of his books.
Tom Clancy wrote spy thrillers with lots of special forces action and improbable secret plots (mostly) against the U.S. His books were as common in the 90s as Harry Potter books were in the 2000s. Basically every adult you met was aware of them, and nearly every man you met had read at least one of them. Nearly every one of the books got made into a (usually mediocre) movie, too.
The Hunt for Red October is an excellent film, though, and you should definitely check it out if you haven't yet.
He wrote some insanely good military thrillers decades ago until he got high off his own farts and largely stopped doing research, but kept writing book after book until he died.
The books are also marketed differently. Manga is being sold in bookstores, after a long battle to get manga on shelves in the West, but comic books still rely on specialty shops. Book shops can usually get refunds for stock that doesn’t sell, but not comic shops. It’s a difficult position to be in for anyone in the industry.
I wouldn't even know where to start with comics. Even infamously long (One Piece) or convoluted (Fate) manga/anime series have a clearly defined "Start Here" point.
I was interested in Daredevil so I looked up beloved DD authors, went to readcomicsonline, and started there. I haven’t branched out too far, but you don’t have to be overwhelmed. Find a character you enjoy, look up the best runs, then read them free online without have to commit to buying hundreds of comics! 😊
Fate has a clearly defined Start Here point? What is it? (Sincere curiosity, I have attempted to figure it out and seen a lot of dissenting opinions lol)
Sigh- no. That isn't the reason; its because they are two entirely different distribution methods and products that people only compare because they are both "sequential art in book form". Manga and comics have different market infrastructures. What exactly are you looking at when you say "Naruto sold more than any western comic!" Like, number of volumes? From when to when- are we counting EVERY spiderman comic as one franchise or only looking at specific graphic novels or single issue sales. It is fully apples and oranges and I really wish people wouldn't try and conflate it to be about whatever *content* agenda they want to promote.
At risk of sounding "place Japan", a lot of manga also doesn't treat the audience like idiots or children which I think is the backbone of its popularity. Young people like sex and violence, and even in our weird online world that hasn't changed. Comics meanwhile try to appeal to everyone as opposed to appealing to a niche - manga has seinen, shonen, josei, shoujo, and these genres often have a lot of overlap. That's not even getting into 4koma, BL, GL, satire etc.
I think Western creators are bound by the shackles of "this thing has to make logical sense and reference another thing!" which completely kneecaps any sci-fi/fantasy story, while manga authors are more in the "RANDOM BULLSHIT GO" camp.
Also the character designs in manga are just more interesting to me. I think the only comic character designs I really like are Nightcrawler and Emma Frost.
Mediums have very different problems despite all the overlap. Manga is made in a way that produces absurd amounts of total garbage but the good stuff is allowed to be as good as it can possibly be. Comics certainly have their highlights and lowlights, but most just end up being boring and mediocre.
The best thing about manga is its industry has a shrewd eye for pushing mainstream works which have both wide appeal and literary value. They don't always get the balance right, obviously, but it's still pretty impressive that most of the popular stuff isn't slop like you could say for comics
You’re kinda joking but I’ve seen some pretty compelling points with the Obama era optimism and how it affected fandom. Specifically how Obama era encouraged a lot of American pride (at least in regards to the MCU)
Cf. Hamilton for IMO the peak example. I saw the show again last year, and it’s still good, but it’s amazing how a work set over 200 years ago feels like the product of a decade ago.
The MCU kinda ran into the same problem that a ton of other series have, where you finish up the first major story act and somehow need to go through the process rebuilding the same kind of hype and investment, only now everyone has sky-high expectations. It happens over and over with sequel media (just to name ones I can think of off the top of my head, ME Andromeda, post-act-1 seasons of RWBY and The Dragon Prince, even Legend of Korra to some degree) and even if you're on the ball it's hard to stick that landing, and even small cracks can break the whole project.
I think what they needed to do was veer off in entirely new directions. Make different kinds of movies. And they kinda tried, but almost every movie ended up having a big act three alien battle. Shang Chi was fine as a family drama before they did all that spirit dragon crap. Dr Strange could've been quite interesting, but wasn't. And so on.
They had to do nothing, actual nothing, for two years. Then come back with the new franchise hero, like Iron Man 1 movie. The person they wanna build around.
I think the other problem is that they banked hard on the multiverse concept (side note: I'd be very curious to see how much ITSV and its popularity played into that direction considering it came out just a few months before Endgame) and then everything with Jonathan Majors happened forcing them to pivot to a new direction
Also, as a personal thing, tying their TV series into the "cinematic universe" also killed a lot of my interest post-endgame and my will to "see everything". Like I remember when a new marvel movie was an event
side note: I'd be very curious to see how much ITSV and its popularity played into that direction considering it came out just a few months before Endgame
Probably little, considering that ITSV wasn't that successful at the box office (it did well, but it wasn't a massive success, certainly not on the scale of what the MCU typically did) and both Endgame (the timeline stuff is there to establish the seeds of variants for audiences) and Spider-Man: Far From Home did set up for the multiverse (yes, it's a fake out, but it's there to prime audiences to the concept of the multiverse).
Plus, Secret Wars was kind of a natural next step for the MCU's next big thing, it's the big Marvel event comic (whether that's the original or 2015) alongside Infinity Gauntlet, and lined up well with incorporating the X-Men and Fantastic Four material they were getting access to from the Fox acquisition*. Even if they were planning on doing it with Kang at first, with the Doom switch being a last minute panic move, there's not really any other direction they could've gone to achieve what they wanted.
*Using the X-Men, at least, was a non-negotiable position for them, it's hard to emphasise how big the X-Men are as a property, they compete a lot with Spider-Man for the top spot at Marvel, so there's no way that they'd get away with just ignoring them.
I think the shows, at least the ones I've watched, were much more creatively successful at telling different and interesting stories. I don't know if they made money, but at least they were interesting. Avengers Part 87 doesn't sound exciting to me at this point.
Pretty sure that was intentional - Endgame, as a culmination of the whole MCU leading up to it, was meant to wrap up the main Avengers' stories.
They were planning on building the MCU going forward around new characters, but a lot of them weren't popular (and Spider-Man was pulled back to Sony).
I believe part of that is actor contracts were expiring and thus they had to write off certain characters if they couldn't renew their contracts.
Another issue common to many franchises is having multiple writers which can lead to inconsistent quality and bad "handoffs". (Like how Multiverse of Madness undid all of Wanda's characterization in WandaVision, or how disjointed the Star Wars sequel trilogy was) I understand why they need multiple writers, they just need a better process for managing them.
And finally its hard to get it right every single time.
Between Boseman's untimely death, Sony pulling back Spiderman and poor audience reception to Captain Marvel and Sam Wilson, most of the heroes set up to carry the torch weren't able to, leaving things feeling directionless.
I dunno, I feel like they didn't really have a choice. If your lead actors say they don't want to do another movie, you can't make them. You can try to recast, but that rarely goes over well.
Probably broadly the same, but more confusing because of Monty's tendency to just... throw stuff he thought was cool into the show on a whim, forcing the writers to write around it.
Okay I don't get the RWBY one, pretty much all of the first arc is devoted to setting up everything that happens afterwards and it ends on the biggest cliffhanger imaginable
It did, but it also paid off pretty much all the villain planning to that point (beyond some vague allusions as to the one behind it) and splintered the main group into four different story arcs that were going to be naturally lower tempo. The cliffhanger generated a lot of hype, but what came after (and, broadly, how long the series was planned to be) meant that volume 4 was never going to live up to that at once.
Mind, Volume 4 had its own issues on top of that, it was a character-and-story focused volume in a series that had always had mixed results doing that, but I'd argue it also ran into the hype wall that the other listed media also did.
Ah, yeah, I guess that technically makes sense. I do think that taking a step back for a breather after such an intense finale is kinda necessary, and V4 is overall one of my favorite Volumes, but there were definitely people mad about it.
Oh yeah I actually think Vol 4 was fine, it wasn't high art or anything but I think it balanced things well enough and most of its storylines were decent-good. But it was literally impossible for it to live up to the hype people had going in.
Yeah, when you think about IW/Endgame in the context of all the movies that came before it, it's nothing short of a miracle they were able to pull it off. Think about all the movies that released before it and how they connected and interwove with one another over nearly a decade while STILL all existing as standalone experiences. Endgame as an experience is genuinely something we might not see again for a long time.
And then they just kept going...and going...and going...
At least with comics you can be like "ok, what character/team/whatever? here's a couple writers' runs that I recommend" and you usually get a fairly even tone and coherent story direction. Not to mentions minis and maxis that will be even more self-contained. With the MCU it originally felt like a fairly coherent "run", but then there was just way too much going on in too many formats and it turned into the cinematic universe equivalent of comic book eventslop.
That’s honestly a huge flaw of the MCU. You can reboot and revamp comics and characters as many times as you want for as long as you want to try and get a new audience. You can only do OG with actors so many times before they die
Yes but I gotta say that sometimes the fact every series is connected sucks. The sillier sides of the mcu kind of feel like they discredit the more serious stories. I was watching daredevil the other day and midway through the realization hit me that this takes place canonically in the same world as infinity war. That, to me, slightly tainted both infinity war (because it kind of put into perspective how silly it is) and daredevil (because this super interesting and serious story takes place in the same world as all those flashy superheros)
The stakes inflation is one of my pet peeves. It's perfectly fine for a sequel to not up the stakes, or even lower them. You can still tell a good story and bigger isn't automatically better.
Probably because the stakes HAVE gone down. In the first movie it was "this is going to open a black hole under New York" and in the second movie it became "The Spot is going to kill my dad"
The funny thing is that stakes elevation has pretty much the opposite effect from a meta standpoint.
The villain threatening to beat up the protagonist's dog is very low stakes but extremely plausible for the villain to achieve, so the threat is legitimate.
The villain threatening to kill the protagonist's best friend is much harder for the writing to actually go through with if the dog is a character that the audience actually cares about, so while it's a bigger threat it means less once you start to realize that.
When the villain rolls up threatening to blow up the protagonist's hometown you can be pretty confident nobody's actually going to get hurt. And as scaling grows bigger and bigger the bragging needs to escalate, so we end up with flashy fights over the fate of the ultimate cosmic-multi-oververse across all timelines and nobody actually cares because if all of existence actually gets destroyed the show is just over and the executives will ensure that never happens.
So we get series where the stakes are always claimed to be getting higher but the actual stakes get lower and lower with every entry until nothing actually matters.
Higher stakes can be done well, though, if writers are not afraid of following through. Gotham tv series, while has many problems, does higher stakes quite well, especially on seasons' finales (and arguably better than lower stakes). That's because sometimes the heroes don't save the day (for example there is a threat of a massive terrorist attack, the heroes try to prevent it, they fail and the attack happens anyway).
One of the things I love so much about Jojo Part 4 is how they avoid this. Part 3 was a globe trotting adventure with very high stakes; we have no reason to think that Dio won't go off to take over the world after he gets his revenge on the Joestar family (and in later parts we see that yes he does intend to do far more than simply rule the world).
But then Part 4 takes place entirely in some sleepy little suburb where the villain is a serial killer who, if left alone, would have gone on to kill another woman every now and then which, yes, is bad, but not "Rewrite all of reality" bad.
I was going to bring up Jojo's Bizarre Adventure after reading that too. It gets a nice little reset opportunity which lets the stakes and scaling go down for the start of each part.
Which isn't unique, though I guess I can't think of many examples. There are stories where new entries are just different things happening in the same world. Which is similar to Jojo. But people should do that more.
Yeah people treat jojo as being 9 or so clear arcs but it's more like the DIO arc (1-3), Kira (4, breather), DIO again kind of but not really (5-6), AMERICA!!!!! (7)
That was one of my favourite things about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 6, after sacrificing herself to defeat a god who wanted to end the world, the villains are three dudes she went to school with who have recently got into magic and started fucking with people. And it works, because it's compelling and emotionally rewarding and there's more to the series than just STAKES.
Sure, but s6 is an outlier there. We go from a Boss Vampire, to three Boss Vampires, to a demonic mayor who'd destroy the town outright, then a Cyberdemon, then a straight-up god, then s6 takes a break and then they fight the actual embodiment of Evil as a concept. The stakes (that's a pun. please laugh) very much do raise throughout.
That's what turned me off of the Laurel Hamilton Anita Blake series. Every villain was "the absolute worst ever." Then it went into that weird Heinleinesque "I want to have sex with everything" fantasy and I gave it up for good.
The MCU already lowered the stakes. In Infinity War the bad guy was out to kill half the universe, but two of its immediate predecessors, GOTG2 and Dr. Strange, the villains came very close to destroying everything and everyone.
Part of what made the Jessica Jones netflix series work was each season the villain had a completely different powerset and stakes. It wasn't a DBZ treadmill of the next guy always having a higher power level and wanting to rule/destroy an even larger portion of the universe.
Stakes inflation needs to be moderated both within a series, and across sequels.
First Deadpool was a very low stake story. For the first half, it was personal vengeance against minor villain, which later included saving his love interest.
Same for the second one. It was all about saving/redeeming a fat kid before he'll become evil. Cable's mission had higher stakes, but it was effectively finished, his target was pretty much guaranteed to end up either non-evil or dead.
And then the third one. Remember all those touching themes of found family? Fuck them, we'll get nostalgia. Small but highly personal stakes? Nope, the entire universe will end up erased. Ha, jokes on you, if you don't stop the villain, all of them will be erased!
To be fair I think this is why Deadpool and Wolverine isn't officially "Deadpool 3", it's about him fighting for the right to have an actual Deadpool 3 (a universe where his supporting cast still exists)
actually really liked that in spn s6. i was thinking "wow surely they're not gonna pull up something more threatening" and then they didn't! i mean, they did a lot of shit, before after and during, but i liked this particular move.
Someone once said that Winx Club did this, where S1 had the villains from the rival school essentially next door, and then S2 had some guy who lived in an underground cave in Fuckoff, Nowhere and spent most of the season gathering energy by himself, just so the main characters can muck around and have character development in the meantime
Xena: Warrior Princess is sort of like this, but if the energy remained good and the cast all enjoyed working with each other so much they kept coming up with funnier and funnier excuses to continue things because they kept getting paid to do so.
It really drags towards the end, but you can still feel how much love there is for the characters and the core of the series from the people working on it.
Gotta tie me down to a chair Clockwork Orange style if you want me to watch the mermaid musical episode though.
Admittedly, present me with the eyeball-opening-device and the worst episode of Xena versus a big comfy chair and a season of Roseanne, I know what I'm choosing.
I actually really enjoy the beginning of that arc as a big fan of reading Jesus as a trickster figure- but it absolutely falls apart, doesn't manage to say anything interesting, and I'm glad the series didn't continue any longer than it did because it had gone from jumping the shark to selling shark fin soup real quick.
Not just marketing in this case, also some hilarious back-and-forth with editorial and corporate where they kept changing their minds about where the whole thing was going, which dragged out the whole event while they scrambled to get them to the new outcome, over and over
so "hey let's bring back the Spider-Man clone from the 70s for an issue or two, that'd be fun" turned into a whole years-long mess across the, what, four? ongoing Spider-Titles while editorial ping-ponged on whether or not Peter Parker was gonna be Spider-Man when the whole thing was over
Meanwhile, they tried to set up a whole interdimensional adventure as a result of the clone saga in the animate series, but got cancelled just as it got going.
Japanese tokusatsu series be like, "Okay guys, it's time for season 36, which means the 36th set of entirely new characters with an entirely new plot in the 9th new continuity."
Or more recently: "We've have 50 good years of sentai time to give the IP a rest... anyways Gavin's back with a team of multicolored heroes and their own big mecha"
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure does this well also. People like the characters, but it’s pretty willing to let them disappear after their story is done. When they do reappear, it’s as side characters, often times who are very different from their younger selves. And they do get definitive ends, with no chance for continually dragged out ever-escalating narratives.
People always talk about this in the context of letting a franchise end, but I miss the opposite - I love it when a franchise doesn't have a clear end and is allowed to just be a place where stories keep taking place, and don't always need to be building to something bigger. Discworld was like this. The old Star Wars novels were (mostly) like this. Most of the Star Treks were like this.
I feel like this is sort of connected to the death of filler episodes in live action TV, same kind of genre-wide shift towards big epics.
The thing is, they did grow past Kirk and Picard, right up until they didn't. DS9 and Voyager particularly were an excellent new direction. And then Enterprise was a bit luke warm and Discovery was not well received and they took the entirely wrong lesson about why.
Unlike a lot of other franchises, Star Trek lends itself well to infinite media serialization. Mostly because the setting can sustain stories outside its most famous characters.
I’ve enjoyed the years since Endgame - sure, the wider story has felt very scattered, and there’s been plenty of misses alongside the hits, but there have still been a lot of hits. And there’s so much to like about the post-Endgame MCU.
I like that some stories just stand on their own and don’t tie in to the larger plot. I like that lesser-known characters are getting their own films or series, and we get to see how they look in live action. I like that stories like Werewolf by Night and Daredevil Born Again are trying out different tones and styles of storytelling (although I wish they would do even more of that!).
Basically, I like how the MCU has become a lot more like the comics since the Infinity Saga ended. We’ve lost the overall cohesion and sense of building up to something, but we’ve gained a sprawling and varied universe to make up for it.
Yeah, the biggest problem isn't that the franchise is lingering. It's the executive need to keep recreating the Endgame hype instead of letting it grow in new directions.
I wonder if part of that for starwars was that no one felt "in charge" enough to actually break the universe so we got a bunch of mostly self-contained story arcs, but no one was actually getting killed off or anything.
Until of course someone decided Things Must Change and it all got kinda weird.
Did you read the post-death sequel, written respectfully with notes planned for the original sequel? It was solid, and it helped a lot with the depressing ending.
I'm usually not a fan of people continuing a series after an author's death, but Douglas Adams pre-death made it clear that he was working on a sequel and that the original ending wasn't the full end. They did it well; it's not as good as the other books, but it's a solid ending overall.
I really should get back to Riordan's books sometime.
I liked the original PJATO, liked Heroes of Olympus, thought the Egyptian-gods one was kinda mid, really liked the Magnus Chase series with the Norse gods, and haven't read the future spin-off about Apollo (the god) being cast down from Olympus to live as a mortal. Also, apparently there's one featuring Indian mythology that wasn't written by Riordan, but has received his blessing?
I share your sentiments, except i was also really into Kane Chronicles for a while (it was objectively mid, Carter is just brown Percy imo, but Sadie was really great). HoO was great, except for the last one. My god House Of Hades was the best the series has ever been, but Blood Of Olympus was such a letdown.
Apollo is where it finally lost me. Wasn't even bad, more of a "Really? There is still more?".
Apparently it's quite good, important characters die. I can't be bothered. I might just be to old for it.
Either way, i don't hate the new stuff, i just think it went further than it had to.
I seem to be the only person who actually thought the books got better with time. Riordan's writing style matured, his prose became a lot more readable, and the storylines and characterization both got a lot more complex. I rate the Trials of Apollo series as his best work.
Pirates of the Caribbean had a trilogy largely about Will and Elizabeth, with Jack as a sort of funnyman/deuteragonist role, and clearly everything was wrapped up by At World’s End. But then they kept making movies with Jack in a more prominent role and they fell off
I completely tuned out after either multiverse of madness or eternals (whichever was later, I saw both). It was fun when there was 3-4 movies a year and that was it, but then they started adding tv shows and it was just too much to keep up with. In theory the idea of having this interconnected universe of movies and tv shows is kinda cool I guess, but in practice my dumb action movies were just giving me homework and I wanted to be able to watch other things
See, as someone who read comic books in the 90s, I feel like the idea that you have to keep up with everything is very much a product of modern media consumption and distribution, instead of just rolling with glimpses of a wider ongoing world that you're just getting a snapshot of
Like, you'd be reading the monthly adventures of Gun-Pouch, and then one day Punchguy shows up with a different costume and power set, and Gun-Pouch goes "wow Punchguy, your new Omni-Laser* is super useful!" and the asterisk takes you to a box that says like "check out Punchguy #143 for details, True Believers!" and I am absolutely not gonna check out Punchguy #143 but it was kind of neat to know that I could
The fact that movies cant really do exposition the way comics do makes the whole "pick up from anywhere and youll be caught up fine" aspect that comic stories have not translate well to film. The MCU is essentially just comic books put to film, with intersecting plots and stories. You should be able to just follow one perspective through everything and be fine, but without a little explanation blurb to catch viewers up to what the other characters have been up to, it just doesnt work.
This was part of my problem with Multiverse of Madness
Like I know I didn't need to see WandaVision to understand the story, it was still a solid standalone experience, but I definitely felt like I was missing out and it was just something I couldn't shake
And this was a problem present in the older Marvel movies but the difference is that those were movies and this was a Disney+ TV series
Not to mention that if you do see WandaVision you're just going to be pissed at the movie for basically ignoring all the developments from it other than "Wanda has kids maybe?"
God if I could recall every anime I have seen this done to. The only one that seems to be immune is One Piece but that is because Oda is an insane person and has kept the narrative with pretty consistent success but I stg if he pulls a Boruto on us I am rioting
I think it'd be hilarious if the One Piece ends up being like the briefcase from Pulp Fiction, where the audience never gets to actually see it, but the characters do and are completely satisfied.
Gears of War is like Halo in that its a good and fairly compelling series that gets associated with gamer fuel vibes. One can argue it was a one off that got pushed into multiple installments; by the way the first two games end you kinda get that.
Yet it is very clear from GoW 3 that that was supposed to be the end of the franchise, to try and kill it dead.
Honestly, as much flak as GoW 4 and 5 get I appreciate what Coalition managed to do with what Epic left them (i.e. fuck all). Especially considering how unsatisfying the ending to 3 felt tbqh.
Is there a deconstruction of this phenomenon out there? Like, a franchise that from the get-go assaults the viewer with too many characters using too many gimmicks to punch each other semi-apathetically in a war-weary world, and then goes somewhere interesting from there.
I’d also like to add executives forcing an extra few seasons beforehand that the story just can’t handle. The Boys and Stranger Things are both guilty of this
Oh yeah putting in more content in the middle isn't always better than putting it in at the end and often ends up worse (you undermine the climax of the story before we've even seen it rather than after)
Cf how absurdly anticlimactic seeing Tom Welling finally wear the Superman suit and take flight was by the end of Smallville
Personally The Boys went to the dogs the second they were allowed to include the scene of homelander doing the white knuckle shuffle to be included because from there it's just been a steady experiment in how far they can push the envelope and it's no different from the comic now in terms of content.
A less well-known example of this is All In The Family. In my opinion, the true end of the show is its original conclusion in Season 8, as Mike and Gloria move on, and Archie and Edith sit sadly in their living room. It seemed a fitting end for these characters, that Archie and Edith couldn't quite escape their circumstances, while their daughter and her husband were availed of entirely new opportunities.
Instead, Season 9 happened at the behest of the network execs (afaik), with the Stivics separation/divorce arc that just didn't work for me. It seemed an entirely strange decision to extend the show when there was a perfectly good ending the previous season. I can't comment on Archie's Place.
I fully tuned out after whichever is the one where they stop Thanos but I was wavering before that because honestly the amount of content was causing too much strain on my suspension of disbelief.
Like Strange needed Thanos to lose that one specific way? He couldn't just kill him? I don't buy that.
Eternals was basically setting up an explanation for this (the Blip has to happen to force the Eternals out of isolation before the Emergence can happen) but they didn't commit to it because they probably rightly felt like adding even more lore would just upset people
They established at the start of the movie strange can chop off people's hands with his portals, then the entire fucking ending conflict is trying to pull the glove off thanos
Ooop. You almost had me until you said season six of supernatural. I'm guessing it's just due to memory? There was a very specific story that ended at the end of season five and, afaik, there was pressure to put Sam back in the real world in the literal last shot of S5, allowing for more episodes.
Yeah endgame, then spiderman as the epilogue. It was such a good ending.
Supernatural i'd even say at the end of s5. If you cut the last 10ish seconds of the final ep to remove the cliffhanger and end it there, its a pretty satisfying wrap up.
Honestly, as a comic book fan, I would be content for them to just keep making movies forever but they're way too committed to keeping the same actors for the characters and writing movies exclusively for the purpose of contributing to big crossovers later on. I enjoy when a comic book writer just decides "Yeah I'm just gonna do whatever I want on this one," and the MCU doesn't really allow for that. As a result of this, we're never gonna get an Immortal Hulk movie and that makes me incredibly sad every day.
I think they maybe could've pulled off continuing the universe, but then they decided to make a zillion unfocused projects rather than zeroing in on a specific team like Phase 1, and then Chadwick Boseman died and it all went to shit
I was actually really interested in Doomsday when I heard of it first because of doom, then it’s just been a steady decline since hearing RDjr is playing him, and apparently everyone else is coming back, and you just realize it’s not really a movie so much as it’s the execs scrambling to put the Beatles back together squeeze out another badly needed hit.
You not liking something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. In any event people will vote with their dollars and that is the final arbiter of things for better or worse.
What fascinates me is the opposite problem, where a series (it's always a TV series) becomes really popular and well-praised and people are so hungry for more, but then for some fucking reason the higher ups at Media Inc. decide to give them way less episodes/runtime/series than they anticipated. Andor (where they'd planned for 5 series and then had to cram it all into one second series) and Arcane (the pacing of s2 just screams that they needed more episodes per arc) are the main examples that come to mind. Absolutely no idea how this happens but it keeps making shows I like get squandered in their prime.
Even game of thrones suffered from this. It was printing money, hbo would have funded several more ten episode seasons easy if they wanted it! But the creators wanted to move on, so instead of handing it off so it could wrap up properly in s10 - s12, they speedran the last few seasons to wrap it up in season 8, in addition slicing the episodes per season from 10 to 8, the rush leading to what is widely considered one of the worst endings of all time.
I don't understand why they don't simply reboot the MCU. Recast all the roles and tell a whole new saga. The individual movies could come in a different order. Different characters could be added or subtracted.
Fans of the old MCU would understand, and non-fans would find it accessible. It could be grounded in the world as it is now, without 15+ years of mythology to keep up with.I literally can't think of a reason to not do this.
i dont think there being a single arc implies that there was a defined ending they're just trudging past now, no one ever claimed or acted like endgame was going to be the last MCU project and it was always going to continue, they just finished the first major arc
Seasons 1-3: A thrilling and grounded cat and mouse chase to take down one extremely meticulous serial killer, someone who the main character has a personal connection to and who is so powerful that stopping them at first seems almost impossible, the killers ultimate defeat is a satisfying conclusion to the series
Season 4: The show became too popular to cancel, so... Oh no, there's a new serial killer in town to be thwarted, and this guy is totally like way more powerful and sadistic and edgy than the last guy, please care about him as much as the last guy, please
Season 5-6: The main characters are now treated like a team of professional serial killer fighters who go from town to town stopping serial killers and uncovering some nebulous 'serial killer society' despite the fact that originally they were just regular people caught in a bad situation, also magic seems to suddenly be a thing now, it was introduced in the spinoff comic which is canon
Season 7: Ratings are dropping off so I guess the show needs to end now. It's the ultimate battle against the secret cabal of all serial killers throughout history who plan to sacrifice the entire planet earth in a ritual to summon the god of bloodshead into our universe, this god of bloodshead turns out to be the now resurrected original villain with this being explained as actually his plan from the beginning, the protagonists defeat him by using the power of friendship to fire some big light beam or something (apparently it makes sense if you've read the comic), the writers to this day insist that this was always planed to be how the show would end
Can I just say I appreciate the Ottomans shoutout?
Although I feel like for the comparison to work you’d need actors in the installments to be the main ones pushing to keep it going; many sultans did attempt reforms but were held back by the Janissaries and sometimes clergy, and often even killed for their efforts. A good example is Osman II/Genç, who as a fun side note was retrained by the balls during his capture
Adventure time (and it’s spinoffs) fits this trope, but only kind of because there is so much room for other stories to be told, but even the stories about someone else always loop back to Finn the Human. And I like him but also he’s had the screen for 10 seasons, and instead of sprinkling random exposition just to never use it again why not build on it
I've been reading marvel comics my entire life and honestly I fully trust them with this. I'm not sure it'll be good but I know a lot of people are going to work really damn hard
If they wanted to keep the MCU going they should have gone the Marvel 2099 route. They could have ditched everything they've done previously for characters that are vicariously influenced by the original events in the MCU. There's plenty of comics to go off of and a lot of these characters like Miguel O'Hara (spider man) are established enough already to get a foothold in.
The MCU run stops at Endgame and then what happens a hundred years in the future. What were the lasting effects of the events in the MCU? Are there still superheroes? What threats does the world face decades after the avengers are dead? That would have been a great way to bring in High Evolutionary as an overarching big bad and not a one off and a few other future related villains.
I got this from FFXIV. Endwalker tied up the loose ends we cared about, and tried to introduce some new ones that turned out to be lukewarm at best. World of Warcraft did the same, with Legion being the last good expansion that tied up all the relevant lore bits before the franchise shit itself to death.
I genuinely feel bad they had to bring back Downey and Evans, but at the same time, it's not my fault I can't give a damn about... actually I don't even know. I legitimately cannot remember any of the new heroes.
I did like the Young Avengers setup though. Kate Bishop and her step dad Lalo Salamanca were pretty cool. But that was a while ago, wasn't it?
Wait! Deadpool and Wolverine was fun!
...but I did have to Google "Last Five Marvel Movies".
I don’t think that one really counts tbh. For one thing the generally self contained nature of most Pokemon games means there isn’t really an overarching “jumping on” or “jumping off” point story wise. For another thing I don’t think the series has ever really been as bad with nostalgia pandering as something like the MCU, they did get into a “Kanto/old region nostalgia” phase in the 2010s but it never really took over the stories or went beyond stuff like “this old Pokemon you like is getting a new form and/or is used by a major trainer!” or “this character from an older game appears in a minor cameo!” and either way they seem to have dropped or de-emphasized that kind of nostalgia bait after Sword and Shield in favor of revisiting old regions and telling new stories in them with a new cast in unfamiliar or heavily redesigned locations.
In a sense, the MCU is the greatest adaption of all time. The replication of rebooting/revamping/drawn out wanky nonsense from the comic books in the medium of film was flawless.
Yeah when people are complaining about it I’m just “Welcome to being a comic book fan.”
Ironically, reboots and retelling the same stories about the same characters is more of a DC thing. Marvel comics are (in)famous for having a single main continuity that treats every story as part of the canon timeline. However, actors age in a way that comic characters don’t.
Tbf, there's a reason that comic books are generally being destroyed by manga lol
Yeah the problem with characters being owned by corporations instead of the individual creators is that the IP has to continue to make money no matter what, which leads to well, American super hero comics.
Regrettably there seems to be a significant percentage of the population who are happy to read the same story over and over. Danelle Steel has made her entire career churning out the books over and over, and James Patterson has perfected the model by slapping his name on ghost written books that seem to come out every other month. Tom Clancy’s name is still on books years after his death and there are other thriller authors that are similar, IPs being continued by ghost writers for corporate profit. That’s one reason why companies are all in on AI, the thought of being able to churn out slop for the peasants to buy and consume without having to pay writers gets every CEOs pee pee hard.
Tom Clancy is dead!?
As of 2013, yup.
Who the fuck even was that guy and why does his name have so much weight anyway
Basically the originator of the modern military thriller genre. When Hunt for Red October came out, Tom Clancy was just some rando insurance agent who wrote a book. Basically overnight he launched an entire genre capturing millions of readers including the President and high-ranking military officials. He just kept churning them out and selling millions of copies basically until he died. And of course smart film and game licensing has kept his name relevant far past the cultural zenith of his books.
Tom Clancy wrote spy thrillers with lots of special forces action and improbable secret plots (mostly) against the U.S. His books were as common in the 90s as Harry Potter books were in the 2000s. Basically every adult you met was aware of them, and nearly every man you met had read at least one of them. Nearly every one of the books got made into a (usually mediocre) movie, too.
The Hunt for Red October is an excellent film, though, and you should definitely check it out if you haven't yet.
He wrote some insanely good military thrillers decades ago until he got high off his own farts and largely stopped doing research, but kept writing book after book until he died.
The books are also marketed differently. Manga is being sold in bookstores, after a long battle to get manga on shelves in the West, but comic books still rely on specialty shops. Book shops can usually get refunds for stock that doesn’t sell, but not comic shops. It’s a difficult position to be in for anyone in the industry.
I wouldn't even know where to start with comics. Even infamously long (One Piece) or convoluted (Fate) manga/anime series have a clearly defined "Start Here" point.
I was interested in Daredevil so I looked up beloved DD authors, went to readcomicsonline, and started there. I haven’t branched out too far, but you don’t have to be overwhelmed. Find a character you enjoy, look up the best runs, then read them free online without have to commit to buying hundreds of comics! 😊
Fate has a clearly defined Start Here point? What is it? (Sincere curiosity, I have attempted to figure it out and seen a lot of dissenting opinions lol)
Play FGO and look up the lore of the characters you grow to like, obviously.
Sigh- no. That isn't the reason; its because they are two entirely different distribution methods and products that people only compare because they are both "sequential art in book form". Manga and comics have different market infrastructures. What exactly are you looking at when you say "Naruto sold more than any western comic!" Like, number of volumes? From when to when- are we counting EVERY spiderman comic as one franchise or only looking at specific graphic novels or single issue sales. It is fully apples and oranges and I really wish people wouldn't try and conflate it to be about whatever *content* agenda they want to promote.
At risk of sounding "place Japan", a lot of manga also doesn't treat the audience like idiots or children which I think is the backbone of its popularity. Young people like sex and violence, and even in our weird online world that hasn't changed. Comics meanwhile try to appeal to everyone as opposed to appealing to a niche - manga has seinen, shonen, josei, shoujo, and these genres often have a lot of overlap. That's not even getting into 4koma, BL, GL, satire etc.
I think Western creators are bound by the shackles of "this thing has to make logical sense and reference another thing!" which completely kneecaps any sci-fi/fantasy story, while manga authors are more in the "RANDOM BULLSHIT GO" camp.
Also the character designs in manga are just more interesting to me. I think the only comic character designs I really like are Nightcrawler and Emma Frost.
Mediums have very different problems despite all the overlap. Manga is made in a way that produces absurd amounts of total garbage but the good stuff is allowed to be as good as it can possibly be. Comics certainly have their highlights and lowlights, but most just end up being boring and mediocre.
The best thing about manga is its industry has a shrewd eye for pushing mainstream works which have both wide appeal and literary value. They don't always get the balance right, obviously, but it's still pretty impressive that most of the popular stuff isn't slop like you could say for comics
i have huge nostalgia for the post avengers 2012 domestic avengers fandom. good times. wonder if it has correlation with obama era optimism?
You’re kinda joking but I’ve seen some pretty compelling points with the Obama era optimism and how it affected fandom. Specifically how Obama era encouraged a lot of American pride (at least in regards to the MCU)
Cf. Hamilton for IMO the peak example. I saw the show again last year, and it’s still good, but it’s amazing how a work set over 200 years ago feels like the product of a decade ago.
The MCU kinda ran into the same problem that a ton of other series have, where you finish up the first major story act and somehow need to go through the process rebuilding the same kind of hype and investment, only now everyone has sky-high expectations. It happens over and over with sequel media (just to name ones I can think of off the top of my head, ME Andromeda, post-act-1 seasons of RWBY and The Dragon Prince, even Legend of Korra to some degree) and even if you're on the ball it's hard to stick that landing, and even small cracks can break the whole project.
I think what they needed to do was veer off in entirely new directions. Make different kinds of movies. And they kinda tried, but almost every movie ended up having a big act three alien battle. Shang Chi was fine as a family drama before they did all that spirit dragon crap. Dr Strange could've been quite interesting, but wasn't. And so on.
They had to do nothing, actual nothing, for two years. Then come back with the new franchise hero, like Iron Man 1 movie. The person they wanna build around.
I think the other problem is that they banked hard on the multiverse concept (side note: I'd be very curious to see how much ITSV and its popularity played into that direction considering it came out just a few months before Endgame) and then everything with Jonathan Majors happened forcing them to pivot to a new direction
Also, as a personal thing, tying their TV series into the "cinematic universe" also killed a lot of my interest post-endgame and my will to "see everything". Like I remember when a new marvel movie was an event
Probably little, considering that ITSV wasn't that successful at the box office (it did well, but it wasn't a massive success, certainly not on the scale of what the MCU typically did) and both Endgame (the timeline stuff is there to establish the seeds of variants for audiences) and Spider-Man: Far From Home did set up for the multiverse (yes, it's a fake out, but it's there to prime audiences to the concept of the multiverse).
Plus, Secret Wars was kind of a natural next step for the MCU's next big thing, it's the big Marvel event comic (whether that's the original or 2015) alongside Infinity Gauntlet, and lined up well with incorporating the X-Men and Fantastic Four material they were getting access to from the Fox acquisition*. Even if they were planning on doing it with Kang at first, with the Doom switch being a last minute panic move, there's not really any other direction they could've gone to achieve what they wanted.
*Using the X-Men, at least, was a non-negotiable position for them, it's hard to emphasise how big the X-Men are as a property, they compete a lot with Spider-Man for the top spot at Marvel, so there's no way that they'd get away with just ignoring them.
I think the shows, at least the ones I've watched, were much more creatively successful at telling different and interesting stories. I don't know if they made money, but at least they were interesting. Avengers Part 87 doesn't sound exciting to me at this point.
It also didn't help that the Russos kinda didn't leave them room to go forward.
Almost all of the main characters of the series except for Thor were dead or retired.
Pretty sure that was intentional - Endgame, as a culmination of the whole MCU leading up to it, was meant to wrap up the main Avengers' stories.
They were planning on building the MCU going forward around new characters, but a lot of them weren't popular (and Spider-Man was pulled back to Sony).
I believe part of that is actor contracts were expiring and thus they had to write off certain characters if they couldn't renew their contracts.
Another issue common to many franchises is having multiple writers which can lead to inconsistent quality and bad "handoffs". (Like how Multiverse of Madness undid all of Wanda's characterization in WandaVision, or how disjointed the Star Wars sequel trilogy was) I understand why they need multiple writers, they just need a better process for managing them.
And finally its hard to get it right every single time.
Between Boseman's untimely death, Sony pulling back Spiderman and poor audience reception to Captain Marvel and Sam Wilson, most of the heroes set up to carry the torch weren't able to, leaving things feeling directionless.
I dunno, I feel like they didn't really have a choice. If your lead actors say they don't want to do another movie, you can't make them. You can try to recast, but that rarely goes over well.
I really do wonder what RWBY would be like if Monty Oum never died from an allergic reaction.
Probably broadly the same, but more confusing because of Monty's tendency to just... throw stuff he thought was cool into the show on a whim, forcing the writers to write around it.
Okay I don't get the RWBY one, pretty much all of the first arc is devoted to setting up everything that happens afterwards and it ends on the biggest cliffhanger imaginable
It did, but it also paid off pretty much all the villain planning to that point (beyond some vague allusions as to the one behind it) and splintered the main group into four different story arcs that were going to be naturally lower tempo. The cliffhanger generated a lot of hype, but what came after (and, broadly, how long the series was planned to be) meant that volume 4 was never going to live up to that at once.
Mind, Volume 4 had its own issues on top of that, it was a character-and-story focused volume in a series that had always had mixed results doing that, but I'd argue it also ran into the hype wall that the other listed media also did.
Ah, yeah, I guess that technically makes sense. I do think that taking a step back for a breather after such an intense finale is kinda necessary, and V4 is overall one of my favorite Volumes, but there were definitely people mad about it.
Oh yeah I actually think Vol 4 was fine, it wasn't high art or anything but I think it balanced things well enough and most of its storylines were decent-good. But it was literally impossible for it to live up to the hype people had going in.
Yeah, when you think about IW/Endgame in the context of all the movies that came before it, it's nothing short of a miracle they were able to pull it off. Think about all the movies that released before it and how they connected and interwove with one another over nearly a decade while STILL all existing as standalone experiences. Endgame as an experience is genuinely something we might not see again for a long time.
And then they just kept going...and going...and going...
It was really good up until it wasn’t (after endgame)
At least with comics you can be like "ok, what character/team/whatever? here's a couple writers' runs that I recommend" and you usually get a fairly even tone and coherent story direction. Not to mentions minis and maxis that will be even more self-contained. With the MCU it originally felt like a fairly coherent "run", but then there was just way too much going on in too many formats and it turned into the cinematic universe equivalent of comic book eventslop.
1000% agree. As someone that been reading comics for 30+ years I'm feeling like the Franco First Time meme.
That’s honestly a huge flaw of the MCU. You can reboot and revamp comics and characters as many times as you want for as long as you want to try and get a new audience. You can only do OG with actors so many times before they die
With shitty events pushing bullshit characters who have no business being involved in the story.
Yes but I gotta say that sometimes the fact every series is connected sucks. The sillier sides of the mcu kind of feel like they discredit the more serious stories. I was watching daredevil the other day and midway through the realization hit me that this takes place canonically in the same world as infinity war. That, to me, slightly tainted both infinity war (because it kind of put into perspective how silly it is) and daredevil (because this super interesting and serious story takes place in the same world as all those flashy superheros)
Comic book chaos, now with extra popcorn and plot armor
u/SpambotWatchdog blacklist
The stakes inflation is one of my pet peeves. It's perfectly fine for a sequel to not up the stakes, or even lower them. You can still tell a good story and bigger isn't automatically better.
The best thing about 90% of spiderman media is that it keeps more grounded stakes.
And then you have Spiderverse breaking all the rules and still excelling
Probably because the stakes HAVE gone down. In the first movie it was "this is going to open a black hole under New York" and in the second movie it became "The Spot is going to kill my dad"
“And (almost) every single spider-man is trying to kill me.”
But I agree, it works best when the stakes are personal and the characters are struggling to sort out how they feel about it all
The funny thing is that stakes elevation has pretty much the opposite effect from a meta standpoint.
The villain threatening to beat up the protagonist's dog is very low stakes but extremely plausible for the villain to achieve, so the threat is legitimate.
The villain threatening to kill the protagonist's best friend is much harder for the writing to actually go through with if the dog is a character that the audience actually cares about, so while it's a bigger threat it means less once you start to realize that.
When the villain rolls up threatening to blow up the protagonist's hometown you can be pretty confident nobody's actually going to get hurt. And as scaling grows bigger and bigger the bragging needs to escalate, so we end up with flashy fights over the fate of the ultimate cosmic-multi-oververse across all timelines and nobody actually cares because if all of existence actually gets destroyed the show is just over and the executives will ensure that never happens.
So we get series where the stakes are always claimed to be getting higher but the actual stakes get lower and lower with every entry until nothing actually matters.
Higher stakes can be done well, though, if writers are not afraid of following through. Gotham tv series, while has many problems, does higher stakes quite well, especially on seasons' finales (and arguably better than lower stakes). That's because sometimes the heroes don't save the day (for example there is a threat of a massive terrorist attack, the heroes try to prevent it, they fail and the attack happens anyway).
One of the things I love so much about Jojo Part 4 is how they avoid this. Part 3 was a globe trotting adventure with very high stakes; we have no reason to think that Dio won't go off to take over the world after he gets his revenge on the Joestar family (and in later parts we see that yes he does intend to do far more than simply rule the world).
But then Part 4 takes place entirely in some sleepy little suburb where the villain is a serial killer who, if left alone, would have gone on to kill another woman every now and then which, yes, is bad, but not "Rewrite all of reality" bad.
Part 1: If we don’t beat Dio then he’s gonna take over the world!
Part 2: If we don’t beat Kars he’s gonna kill everyone and take over the world!
Part 3: If we don’t beat DIO then he’s gonna take over the world!
Part 4: If we don’t beat Kira then this one small town is gonna be in moderate danger!
Part 5: If we don’t beat the boss Italy is gonna be in trouble as the mafia grows even stronger!
Part 6: PUCCI IS GONNA FUCK UP THE ENTIRE GODDAMN UNIVERSE!!!
Part 7: President Valentine is gonna get super strong and start deflecting American problems elsewhere
Part 8&9: idk man
Part 8: "A dubious little creature, getting up to mischief. This is no good."
Shuckle.png
"Ugh, the beast is demonic in nature. Very icky, no good."
Part 9: Money
Part 5 is more of we need to kill the mob boss so we can run Italy instead of him.
I was going to bring up Jojo's Bizarre Adventure after reading that too. It gets a nice little reset opportunity which lets the stakes and scaling go down for the start of each part.
Which isn't unique, though I guess I can't think of many examples. There are stories where new entries are just different things happening in the same world. Which is similar to Jojo. But people should do that more.
Yeah people treat jojo as being 9 or so clear arcs but it's more like the DIO arc (1-3), Kira (4, breather), DIO again kind of but not really (5-6), AMERICA!!!!! (7)
and then 8 and 9 are just their own thing
That was one of my favourite things about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 6, after sacrificing herself to defeat a god who wanted to end the world, the villains are three dudes she went to school with who have recently got into magic and started fucking with people. And it works, because it's compelling and emotionally rewarding and there's more to the series than just STAKES.
Sure, but s6 is an outlier there. We go from a Boss Vampire, to three Boss Vampires, to a demonic mayor who'd destroy the town outright, then a Cyberdemon, then a straight-up god, then s6 takes a break and then they fight the actual embodiment of Evil as a concept. The stakes (that's a pun. please laugh) very much do raise throughout.
That's what turned me off of the Laurel Hamilton Anita Blake series. Every villain was "the absolute worst ever." Then it went into that weird Heinleinesque "I want to have sex with everything" fantasy and I gave it up for good.
The MCU already lowered the stakes. In Infinity War the bad guy was out to kill half the universe, but two of its immediate predecessors, GOTG2 and Dr. Strange, the villains came very close to destroying everything and everyone.
To be fair it was only earth at risk in Doctor strange.
Is that right? I thought it was all of existence that Dormammu was after.
Part of what made the Jessica Jones netflix series work was each season the villain had a completely different powerset and stakes. It wasn't a DBZ treadmill of the next guy always having a higher power level and wanting to rule/destroy an even larger portion of the universe.
Stakes inflation needs to be moderated both within a series, and across sequels.
That's what I hate about Deadpool and Wolverine.
First Deadpool was a very low stake story. For the first half, it was personal vengeance against minor villain, which later included saving his love interest.
Same for the second one. It was all about saving/redeeming a fat kid before he'll become evil. Cable's mission had higher stakes, but it was effectively finished, his target was pretty much guaranteed to end up either non-evil or dead.
And then the third one. Remember all those touching themes of found family? Fuck them, we'll get nostalgia. Small but highly personal stakes? Nope, the entire universe will end up erased. Ha, jokes on you, if you don't stop the villain, all of them will be erased!
For fucks sake.
To be fair I think this is why Deadpool and Wolverine isn't officially "Deadpool 3", it's about him fighting for the right to have an actual Deadpool 3 (a universe where his supporting cast still exists)
actually really liked that in spn s6. i was thinking "wow surely they're not gonna pull up something more threatening" and then they didn't! i mean, they did a lot of shit, before after and during, but i liked this particular move.
Someone once said that Winx Club did this, where S1 had the villains from the rival school essentially next door, and then S2 had some guy who lived in an underground cave in Fuckoff, Nowhere and spent most of the season gathering energy by himself, just so the main characters can muck around and have character development in the meantime
Xena: Warrior Princess is sort of like this, but if the energy remained good and the cast all enjoyed working with each other so much they kept coming up with funnier and funnier excuses to continue things because they kept getting paid to do so.
It really drags towards the end, but you can still feel how much love there is for the characters and the core of the series from the people working on it.
Gotta tie me down to a chair Clockwork Orange style if you want me to watch the mermaid musical episode though.
I have only seen Married With Fishsticks once and considered it better than a lot of tv of the era.
Admittedly, present me with the eyeball-opening-device and the worst episode of Xena versus a big comfy chair and a season of Roseanne, I know what I'm choosing.
The season finale turning into "Let's eradicate paganism in the name of Christianity and this is awesome" made me feel physically ill ngl
I actually really enjoy the beginning of that arc as a big fan of reading Jesus as a trickster figure- but it absolutely falls apart, doesn't manage to say anything interesting, and I'm glad the series didn't continue any longer than it did because it had gone from jumping the shark to selling shark fin soup real quick.
The Xenavico Technique
See, the comic-related example I would have pointed to was the Clone Saga in Spider-Man. It was extended like 3 years because Marketing said so
we still have one more day bs with peter can't be happy with anyone
Not just marketing in this case, also some hilarious back-and-forth with editorial and corporate where they kept changing their minds about where the whole thing was going, which dragged out the whole event while they scrambled to get them to the new outcome, over and over
so "hey let's bring back the Spider-Man clone from the 70s for an issue or two, that'd be fun" turned into a whole years-long mess across the, what, four? ongoing Spider-Titles while editorial ping-ponged on whether or not Peter Parker was gonna be Spider-Man when the whole thing was over
Meanwhile, they tried to set up a whole interdimensional adventure as a result of the clone saga in the animate series, but got cancelled just as it got going.
As is now traditional for Multiverse Sagas
I thought we had agreed to never mention the clone saga and Ben Riley ever again
Under penalty of torture
Yu-Gi-Oh! solves this by just having an entirely different setting and cast of characters whenever they want to make a new instalment.
Japanese tokusatsu series be like, "Okay guys, it's time for season 36, which means the 36th set of entirely new characters with an entirely new plot in the 9th new continuity."
Yeah but that’s a good way to it, lets people start anywhere.
Or more recently: "We've have 50 good years of sentai time to give the IP a rest... anyways Gavin's back with a team of multicolored heroes and their own big mecha"
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure does this well also. People like the characters, but it’s pretty willing to let them disappear after their story is done. When they do reappear, it’s as side characters, often times who are very different from their younger selves. And they do get definitive ends, with no chance for continually dragged out ever-escalating narratives.
And on very rare occasions one of them becomes a turtle.
Or an old man.
People always talk about this in the context of letting a franchise end, but I miss the opposite - I love it when a franchise doesn't have a clear end and is allowed to just be a place where stories keep taking place, and don't always need to be building to something bigger. Discworld was like this. The old Star Wars novels were (mostly) like this. Most of the Star Treks were like this. I feel like this is sort of connected to the death of filler episodes in live action TV, same kind of genre-wide shift towards big epics.
I'm fine with the series not ending so long as they are allowed to grow past the originals.
Like great make more Star trek but at some point you need to move past picard and Kirk
The thing is, they did grow past Kirk and Picard, right up until they didn't. DS9 and Voyager particularly were an excellent new direction. And then Enterprise was a bit luke warm and Discovery was not well received and they took the entirely wrong lesson about why.
Good old Doctor Who
Another fantastic example
Sorry, only Tennant era nostalgia here from now on!
Unlike a lot of other franchises, Star Trek lends itself well to infinite media serialization. Mostly because the setting can sustain stories outside its most famous characters.
Exactly. I don’t want the MCU to end.
I’ve enjoyed the years since Endgame - sure, the wider story has felt very scattered, and there’s been plenty of misses alongside the hits, but there have still been a lot of hits. And there’s so much to like about the post-Endgame MCU.
I like that some stories just stand on their own and don’t tie in to the larger plot. I like that lesser-known characters are getting their own films or series, and we get to see how they look in live action. I like that stories like Werewolf by Night and Daredevil Born Again are trying out different tones and styles of storytelling (although I wish they would do even more of that!).
Basically, I like how the MCU has become a lot more like the comics since the Infinity Saga ended. We’ve lost the overall cohesion and sense of building up to something, but we’ve gained a sprawling and varied universe to make up for it.
Yeah, the biggest problem isn't that the franchise is lingering. It's the executive need to keep recreating the Endgame hype instead of letting it grow in new directions.
Zelda games are great for this imo
Like there's the whole timeline aspect but otherwise every game is pretty much just its own standalone thing with the occasional nod
I wonder if part of that for starwars was that no one felt "in charge" enough to actually break the universe so we got a bunch of mostly self-contained story arcs, but no one was actually getting killed off or anything.
Until of course someone decided Things Must Change and it all got kinda weird.
I hate to say this, but i must:
Percy Jackson. Yes, I mean the books.
I'm not sure if I grew up or if the quality really dropped. I do remember really liking the Egyptian spin off tho.
Yeah, the first series and the Egyptian books were good, but after that, the quality took a dive, and it never recovered.
oh yes. Trials of apollo should have been the last where we see all og characters. maybe a college short story. Cuz recent books aren't vibing at all
Honestly, Blood Of Olympus already felt pretty tired. But i'm no longer a teenager, maybe i just grew out of it
Current books feel more like lighthearted "after-adventures" than continually trying to up the stakes, so at least Rick's got that going for him
Riordan is still making books?? I thought Trials of Apollo WAS the end
Speaking of books: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The final one made me existentially depressed. Dunno if I’ve ever recovered
Did you read the post-death sequel, written respectfully with notes planned for the original sequel? It was solid, and it helped a lot with the depressing ending.
I'm usually not a fan of people continuing a series after an author's death, but Douglas Adams pre-death made it clear that he was working on a sequel and that the original ending wasn't the full end. They did it well; it's not as good as the other books, but it's a solid ending overall.
I read The Salmon of Doubt but it just made me sadder (possibly because his death was still so recent)
Did that series go on too long?
It went on longer than Douglas Adams wanted to write it.
Explains why the latter books are so odd. I haven't read them since I was a kid but I remember thinking the tone shift was very strange.
The first two books are the "complete story" as he originally envisioned it when it was a radio show
Everything after that is him having complicated feelings about being pushed to keep on milking his one big cash cow
I really should get back to Riordan's books sometime.
I liked the original PJATO, liked Heroes of Olympus, thought the Egyptian-gods one was kinda mid, really liked the Magnus Chase series with the Norse gods, and haven't read the future spin-off about Apollo (the god) being cast down from Olympus to live as a mortal. Also, apparently there's one featuring Indian mythology that wasn't written by Riordan, but has received his blessing?
I share your sentiments, except i was also really into Kane Chronicles for a while (it was objectively mid, Carter is just brown Percy imo, but Sadie was really great). HoO was great, except for the last one. My god House Of Hades was the best the series has ever been, but Blood Of Olympus was such a letdown.
Apollo is where it finally lost me. Wasn't even bad, more of a "Really? There is still more?". Apparently it's quite good, important characters die. I can't be bothered. I might just be to old for it. Either way, i don't hate the new stuff, i just think it went further than it had to.
I seem to be the only person who actually thought the books got better with time. Riordan's writing style matured, his prose became a lot more readable, and the storylines and characterization both got a lot more complex. I rate the Trials of Apollo series as his best work.
Let's not leave Star Wars out of this paradigm.
Yeah, the sequels & some of the recent shows fall into this. Prequels are bad for a different reason though
real but at least we got Andor out of it 💁
Star wars doesn't have to be like that which makes it even weirder that Disney forced it into this paradigm.
Star wars could just be a setting for any story or set of characters and they are so unwilling to do that.
Pirates of the Caribbean had a trilogy largely about Will and Elizabeth, with Jack as a sort of funnyman/deuteragonist role, and clearly everything was wrapped up by At World’s End. But then they kept making movies with Jack in a more prominent role and they fell off
I have nothing left, except Spider-Man...
Pictures of Spider-Man!
Comics fans: First time?
I completely tuned out after either multiverse of madness or eternals (whichever was later, I saw both). It was fun when there was 3-4 movies a year and that was it, but then they started adding tv shows and it was just too much to keep up with. In theory the idea of having this interconnected universe of movies and tv shows is kinda cool I guess, but in practice my dumb action movies were just giving me homework and I wanted to be able to watch other things
See, as someone who read comic books in the 90s, I feel like the idea that you have to keep up with everything is very much a product of modern media consumption and distribution, instead of just rolling with glimpses of a wider ongoing world that you're just getting a snapshot of
Like, you'd be reading the monthly adventures of Gun-Pouch, and then one day Punchguy shows up with a different costume and power set, and Gun-Pouch goes "wow Punchguy, your new Omni-Laser* is super useful!" and the asterisk takes you to a box that says like "check out Punchguy #143 for details, True Believers!" and I am absolutely not gonna check out Punchguy #143 but it was kind of neat to know that I could
Yeah, but that same kinda thing is why I never really got into superhero comics.
The fact that movies cant really do exposition the way comics do makes the whole "pick up from anywhere and youll be caught up fine" aspect that comic stories have not translate well to film. The MCU is essentially just comic books put to film, with intersecting plots and stories. You should be able to just follow one perspective through everything and be fine, but without a little explanation blurb to catch viewers up to what the other characters have been up to, it just doesnt work.
This was part of my problem with Multiverse of Madness
Like I know I didn't need to see WandaVision to understand the story, it was still a solid standalone experience, but I definitely felt like I was missing out and it was just something I couldn't shake
And this was a problem present in the older Marvel movies but the difference is that those were movies and this was a Disney+ TV series
Not to mention that if you do see WandaVision you're just going to be pissed at the movie for basically ignoring all the developments from it other than "Wanda has kids maybe?"
God if I could recall every anime I have seen this done to. The only one that seems to be immune is One Piece but that is because Oda is an insane person and has kept the narrative with pretty consistent success but I stg if he pulls a Boruto on us I am rioting
I think it'd be hilarious if the One Piece ends up being like the briefcase from Pulp Fiction, where the audience never gets to actually see it, but the characters do and are completely satisfied.
They have X-Men. I want X-Men.
They can end this nonsense now and give me a new X-Men movie.
Until then, I'm over it.
is fox still holding on it x-men's corpse or did marvel negotiate something?
Disney/Marvel has had X-Men in their hands since 2019. They've just had all this other stuff planned and were gonna do X-Men later.
So far, we've gotten that funny Ketchup & Mustard movie about two Canadians with healthcare powers and sharp weapons.
Gears of War is like Halo in that its a good and fairly compelling series that gets associated with gamer fuel vibes. One can argue it was a one off that got pushed into multiple installments; by the way the first two games end you kinda get that.
Yet it is very clear from GoW 3 that that was supposed to be the end of the franchise, to try and kill it dead.
Somehow, the locust returned.
Indeed. As ridiculous as that twist was it wasn't uncommon in the extended canon!
Honestly, as much flak as GoW 4 and 5 get I appreciate what Coalition managed to do with what Epic left them (i.e. fuck all). Especially considering how unsatisfying the ending to 3 felt tbqh.
The Simpsons.
Dragon Ball.
Peter Griffin voice: I did not care for Super
Is there a deconstruction of this phenomenon out there? Like, a franchise that from the get-go assaults the viewer with too many characters using too many gimmicks to punch each other semi-apathetically in a war-weary world, and then goes somewhere interesting from there.
The purge kinda
I’d also like to add executives forcing an extra few seasons beforehand that the story just can’t handle. The Boys and Stranger Things are both guilty of this
Oh yeah putting in more content in the middle isn't always better than putting it in at the end and often ends up worse (you undermine the climax of the story before we've even seen it rather than after)
Cf how absurdly anticlimactic seeing Tom Welling finally wear the Superman suit and take flight was by the end of Smallville
Personally The Boys went to the dogs the second they were allowed to include the scene of homelander doing the white knuckle shuffle to be included because from there it's just been a steady experiment in how far they can push the envelope and it's no different from the comic now in terms of content.
A less well-known example of this is All In The Family. In my opinion, the true end of the show is its original conclusion in Season 8, as Mike and Gloria move on, and Archie and Edith sit sadly in their living room. It seemed a fitting end for these characters, that Archie and Edith couldn't quite escape their circumstances, while their daughter and her husband were availed of entirely new opportunities.
Instead, Season 9 happened at the behest of the network execs (afaik), with the Stivics separation/divorce arc that just didn't work for me. It seemed an entirely strange decision to extend the show when there was a perfectly good ending the previous season. I can't comment on Archie's Place.
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned Supernatural yet. And on the tumblr subreddit too.
I fully tuned out after whichever is the one where they stop Thanos but I was wavering before that because honestly the amount of content was causing too much strain on my suspension of disbelief.
Like Strange needed Thanos to lose that one specific way? He couldn't just kill him? I don't buy that.
Eternals was basically setting up an explanation for this (the Blip has to happen to force the Eternals out of isolation before the Emergence can happen) but they didn't commit to it because they probably rightly felt like adding even more lore would just upset people
Yeah, that entire fucking plot was stupid
They established at the start of the movie strange can chop off people's hands with his portals, then the entire fucking ending conflict is trying to pull the glove off thanos
Endgame should have been the last marvel superhero movie. What a kick ass ending to the franchise.
Much like Supernatural. It had such a great and logical ending at season 6. I just stopped watching.
Ooop. You almost had me until you said season six of supernatural. I'm guessing it's just due to memory? There was a very specific story that ended at the end of season five and, afaik, there was pressure to put Sam back in the real world in the literal last shot of S5, allowing for more episodes.
Yeah endgame, then spiderman as the epilogue. It was such a good ending.
Supernatural i'd even say at the end of s5. If you cut the last 10ish seconds of the final ep to remove the cliffhanger and end it there, its a pretty satisfying wrap up.
Honestly, as a comic book fan, I would be content for them to just keep making movies forever but they're way too committed to keeping the same actors for the characters and writing movies exclusively for the purpose of contributing to big crossovers later on. I enjoy when a comic book writer just decides "Yeah I'm just gonna do whatever I want on this one," and the MCU doesn't really allow for that. As a result of this, we're never gonna get an Immortal Hulk movie and that makes me incredibly sad every day.
I think they maybe could've pulled off continuing the universe, but then they decided to make a zillion unfocused projects rather than zeroing in on a specific team like Phase 1, and then Chadwick Boseman died and it all went to shit
I was actually really interested in Doomsday when I heard of it first because of doom, then it’s just been a steady decline since hearing RDjr is playing him, and apparently everyone else is coming back, and you just realize it’s not really a movie so much as it’s the execs scrambling to put the Beatles back together squeeze out another badly needed hit.
5:00 - 5:30
“Everything should be a trilogy… should have a beginning, middle, and end”.
The MCU never had a planned end and they weren't forced by execs to keep going
The MCU never had a
Planned end and they weren't forced by
Execs to keep going
- Stunning-Sherbert801
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This is basically how I feel about superhero comics in general. Nobody ever stays dead, nothing ever really changes.
You not liking something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. In any event people will vote with their dollars and that is the final arbiter of things for better or worse.
Dragon Ball. Harry Potter. But mostly Dragon Ball.
What fascinates me is the opposite problem, where a series (it's always a TV series) becomes really popular and well-praised and people are so hungry for more, but then for some fucking reason the higher ups at Media Inc. decide to give them way less episodes/runtime/series than they anticipated. Andor (where they'd planned for 5 series and then had to cram it all into one second series) and Arcane (the pacing of s2 just screams that they needed more episodes per arc) are the main examples that come to mind. Absolutely no idea how this happens but it keeps making shows I like get squandered in their prime.
Even game of thrones suffered from this. It was printing money, hbo would have funded several more ten episode seasons easy if they wanted it! But the creators wanted to move on, so instead of handing it off so it could wrap up properly in s10 - s12, they speedran the last few seasons to wrap it up in season 8, in addition slicing the episodes per season from 10 to 8, the rush leading to what is widely considered one of the worst endings of all time.
I don't understand why they don't simply reboot the MCU. Recast all the roles and tell a whole new saga. The individual movies could come in a different order. Different characters could be added or subtracted.
Fans of the old MCU would understand, and non-fans would find it accessible. It could be grounded in the world as it is now, without 15+ years of mythology to keep up with.I literally can't think of a reason to not do this.
They did that every decade with spiderman and everyone complained constantly
Dragon Ball should have ended with Cell
i dont think there being a single arc implies that there was a defined ending they're just trudging past now, no one ever claimed or acted like endgame was going to be the last MCU project and it was always going to continue, they just finished the first major arc
Seasons 1-3: A thrilling and grounded cat and mouse chase to take down one extremely meticulous serial killer, someone who the main character has a personal connection to and who is so powerful that stopping them at first seems almost impossible, the killers ultimate defeat is a satisfying conclusion to the series
Season 4: The show became too popular to cancel, so... Oh no, there's a new serial killer in town to be thwarted, and this guy is totally like way more powerful and sadistic and edgy than the last guy, please care about him as much as the last guy, please
Season 5-6: The main characters are now treated like a team of professional serial killer fighters who go from town to town stopping serial killers and uncovering some nebulous 'serial killer society' despite the fact that originally they were just regular people caught in a bad situation, also magic seems to suddenly be a thing now, it was introduced in the spinoff comic which is canon
Season 7: Ratings are dropping off so I guess the show needs to end now. It's the ultimate battle against the secret cabal of all serial killers throughout history who plan to sacrifice the entire planet earth in a ritual to summon the god of bloodshead into our universe, this god of bloodshead turns out to be the now resurrected original villain with this being explained as actually his plan from the beginning, the protagonists defeat him by using the power of friendship to fire some big light beam or something (apparently it makes sense if you've read the comic), the writers to this day insist that this was always planed to be how the show would end
Most fans advise you stop watching after season 3
Can I just say I appreciate the Ottomans shoutout?
Although I feel like for the comparison to work you’d need actors in the installments to be the main ones pushing to keep it going; many sultans did attempt reforms but were held back by the Janissaries and sometimes clergy, and often even killed for their efforts. A good example is Osman II/Genç, who as a fun side note was retrained by the balls during his capture
It’s like the MCU became leftovers reheated one too many times
NCIS
The Spider-Man Clone Saga is the poster child for this.
Adventure time (and it’s spinoffs) fits this trope, but only kind of because there is so much room for other stories to be told, but even the stories about someone else always loop back to Finn the Human. And I like him but also he’s had the screen for 10 seasons, and instead of sprinkling random exposition just to never use it again why not build on it
I've been reading marvel comics my entire life and honestly I fully trust them with this. I'm not sure it'll be good but I know a lot of people are going to work really damn hard
Granted, I do feel with a bit more luck, the Ottomans could’ve successfully reformed and remain a bit of a prominent force of sorts.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – do we really need more (and more) of this?
If they wanted to keep the MCU going they should have gone the Marvel 2099 route. They could have ditched everything they've done previously for characters that are vicariously influenced by the original events in the MCU. There's plenty of comics to go off of and a lot of these characters like Miguel O'Hara (spider man) are established enough already to get a foothold in.
The MCU run stops at Endgame and then what happens a hundred years in the future. What were the lasting effects of the events in the MCU? Are there still superheroes? What threats does the world face decades after the avengers are dead? That would have been a great way to bring in High Evolutionary as an overarching big bad and not a one off and a few other future related villains.
Oh, hold on. Isn't this the tale
of captain jack sparrow
on a mythical quest
to find Tortuga?
Incorrect opinion.
I got this from FFXIV. Endwalker tied up the loose ends we cared about, and tried to introduce some new ones that turned out to be lukewarm at best. World of Warcraft did the same, with Legion being the last good expansion that tied up all the relevant lore bits before the franchise shit itself to death.
I genuinely feel bad they had to bring back Downey and Evans, but at the same time, it's not my fault I can't give a damn about... actually I don't even know. I legitimately cannot remember any of the new heroes.
I did like the Young Avengers setup though. Kate Bishop and her step dad Lalo Salamanca were pretty cool. But that was a while ago, wasn't it?
Wait! Deadpool and Wolverine was fun!
...but I did have to Google "Last Five Marvel Movies".
Gee, I wonder what Kazutaka Kodaka would think of this.
supernatural after season 5
Strange way to say you don't like turkish people but ok
I'm just sick in my heart of super hero movies. They just feel kinda blah to me and have ever since Endgame.
The last superhero movies I watched were WW84 and Batman v. Superman so that didn't help.
Doctor Who is that exactly rn.
Pokémon.
I don’t think that one really counts tbh. For one thing the generally self contained nature of most Pokemon games means there isn’t really an overarching “jumping on” or “jumping off” point story wise. For another thing I don’t think the series has ever really been as bad with nostalgia pandering as something like the MCU, they did get into a “Kanto/old region nostalgia” phase in the 2010s but it never really took over the stories or went beyond stuff like “this old Pokemon you like is getting a new form and/or is used by a major trainer!” or “this character from an older game appears in a minor cameo!” and either way they seem to have dropped or de-emphasized that kind of nostalgia bait after Sword and Shield in favor of revisiting old regions and telling new stories in them with a new cast in unfamiliar or heavily redesigned locations.
Guess that makes the MCU the Sick Old Man of Hollywood. Or perhaps the Senile Peggy of Hollywood.