FairestWorld
1d ago
Yeah, not to mention the Hulk being afraid to um... Hulk out.
Probably because the action scenes / choreography would've been much harder to do with Hulk rampaging around.
Plus, Thanos had the space stone, so he could've just spammed teleport, grab Strange and go to wherever. While Strange also has teleport, his is much more time intensive, so Thanos had the edge.
FairestWorld
1d ago
I just now realized I should've included this in the OP, but I was blindsided since it's actually one of the few above-avereage Marvel movies, but in Civil War, the conflict between the 2 sides is over Bucky, Cap's long lost friend, who being brainwashed, killed Tony's (Ironman) parents. The previous movies establish a friend/rival relationship between Ironman and Cap, who are the defacto leaders of the Avengers. There's a line in the trailer where Cap says "Tony, he's my friend" and Ironman responds "So was I" which still gives me goosebumps.
While there still is a ideological undercurrent in the movie (should heroes work unrestrained or should they be state agents and everything that comes with either choice), in the comics that's the main thing.
I guess the jarring thing is that this sort of "drawing battlelines and breaking up the organization/friend group" is usually reserved for romantic conflicts in a love triangle or just 2 guys vying for one woman (think Troy).
I guess this is more common in Japanese media, Naruto has an unhealthy obsession with bringing Sasuke (even weirder friends/rivals relationship) off the wrong/evil path.
FairestWorld
1d ago
Yes, that's basically what happens, with some underlying "these people are/can be actually heroic if not for their traumas/life circumstances.
The argument over Cap's shield happens in Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
And "Fake Cap" is kind of weird, since John is arguably much more suited to be Captain America than even Steve Rogers. If you'd have to choose a priori, would you pick the scrawny nobody or the multiple times decorated soldier with proven experience and skills?
The only reason Steve got picked by the guy who developed the highly experimental and unproven Super Soldier Serum is because he showed the willingness to sacrifice himself when he threw himself over a grenade during bootcamp.
You might say that you'd test it on a guy like Steve and then roll it out to all of the John Walkers out there. The only reason that doesn't happen is because the facility gets sabotaged and they lose the formula.
FairestWorld
1d ago
I think the reason the scene is so maligned, is because it seems contrived to have the heroes lose from a basically unloseable situation, just so they could have thr sequel.
Like,
FairestWorld
1d ago
... what? I think that's the most common trope in the last few decades, friends-to-lovers.
Anecdotally, online and offline, it also seems that at least in the Anglosphere (maybe exclusively?) a lot of women express preference for starting as friends, which may then develop into a romantic relationship.
FairestWorld
1d ago
My point is that there is a separation between "romance" books that are m/f coded, namely harem/vampire type of stuff, and romance like the sitcom/TV show "will they/won't they" stuff that permeated across genres. Think Ross/Rachel or Mulder/Scully. Those stories are not really about the couple, but it becomes a, if not the, driving force the more you go through it. Which mirrors life, since you wouldn't ditch your plans with your friends at the needs of a 2 week relationship at 20, but if you're 30 and in a long-term relationship for some time, it's a different (expected) response.
FairestWorld
2d ago
I wanted to mention it as an example for the femme fatale / bumbling idiot pairing example, but I felt it would have taken too long to explain properly, although clearly you demonstrated the opposite.
Starlord is also portrayed as the bumbling idiot of the group, like he gets replaced by Thor as the leader when he just... shows up.
Regarding "losing" the Infinity War,
FairestWorld
2d ago
I... have to nitpick on this. A lot of comics (and especially their movies) leave giant plot holes. I mean the medium is built on 80 or so years of publishing tens of titles yearly across hundreds of writers. Which means inconclusive answers to a lot of questions regarding power scaling and such.
But the movies have a bigger problem, namely since their stories usually involve origin stories for their villains, they kind of just pop up one after another. Which begs the question why after the Avengers, they don't just all show up to fight the 1-2 villains each solo hero fights in his own movie. I mean yeah it's always explained that everyone else is busy, but in the comics that's sort of assumed since there's dozens of villains per hero (plus, there aren't any pesky IP rights or contracts to have them show up whenever).
So um, besides having literally thousands of pages of lore to just pluck up for the romantic subplots or have the writer(s) insert their cleaned-up bad/great relationships/fantasies, everything is just... hollowed out. Like there's foundations there as I described them in the OP, since I guess Hollywood blockbuster script-writing is more of a science than art, but it's just hollow.
FairestWorld
2d ago
Yes, but how much of that 25-30% is literal smut ("romantasly"?) or a Sci-Fi with added romance to it?
Does 50 Shades belong in the romance category?
A lot of modern RPGs in the last 15-20 years have an optional romance tacked in, but it cannot be said that Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate or Skyrim are romance games. Yes, romance videogames are rare and hard to make/market.
I guess the underlying principle to follow would be "Does the protagonist save the world and gets a girlfriend after" or "He saves the world either together with her or for her". It's hard to describe broadly, without giving examples. I guess The Witcher (books) is closer to a romance despite not being labelled as one then most "romantasy" books, even though the relationship is not the forefront, it's easily seen to be vital to both characters.
FairestWorld
2d ago
Hollowed writers is definitely part of it. More broadly, I remember a relatively recent Lindyman post about how people/artists used to have much more interesting and varied lifestyles. Going through their wikipedia seems like their lives just upend at random, back and forth from rags to riches across varied types of work.
Today, people focus on a career pretty early, due to increased access to education, credentialism, safetyism and general structural rigidness of life. Yes, I guess a software dev can just quit, move out of Sillicon Valley to Idaho and be a writer while working some odd jobs, but that's unfeasible unless he saved up a lot or just made millions. But more likely he either got burned out, did FIRE or usually fried himself up with psychadelics.
Even so, there's more romantic relationships now than ever. Maybe it's so common audiences lost interest in seeing them on the big screen. Maybe there is such a discrepancy of expectation from growing up with ideas about romance, that when confronted with the reality personally, people are just not interested. Seeing so many divorces, breakups, cheating or other such behaviors while growing up on "Love conquers all" is cognitively dissonant.
Maybe past works were so interesting because most people didn't marry out of love, but ended up loving their partner nonetheless? So a story of pure genuine desire had a different impact.
Maybe over the last few decades, as fiction became more popular and more media genres portrayed, reached a peak of "people believing romance to be possible and desireable" and "people did find romance" and we're slowly coming off that peak?
I think that's what happened to hookups and hookup culture. Popular sitcoms (and other movies) in the 2000s made it super desirable and popular, out of what experiences, personal or witnessed, writers had from being young in the 1980s and 1990s. As hookup culture gained traction, it reached a peak (probably 1-2 years after Tinder was invented) and now we're here, with the (male) loneliness epidemic.
I'd say that since romance that was previously pretty achievable becomes more "impossible", then we should see more impossible romances and relationships in media. I am thinking of monsters, aliens, robots etc but that would be difficult to disentangle from the lifting of (intimate) taboos.
FairestWorld
2d ago
Romance
I recently watched the newest Marvel movie, Thunderbolts. Personally, I have seen almost all of them in a movie theatre and a few of the TV shows. The company's slate of movies in the last few years has been pretty bad, which can be seen in the (lack of) discourse and the box office. As some tweet put it, Marvel movies went from ubiquitous and massively talked about to ubiquitous and ignored.
However, I want to talk about the absence of romance, specifically in Thunderbolts but also in the larger MCU.
Thunderbolts is basically a supposedly anti-hero (but really villains, I won't go into the villain-to-antihero pipeline that is currently happening eg Harley Quinn) team in the vein of Avengers, but unconcerned with letting their targets/enemies live. All but one of the characters has been previously introduced in another movie or TV show.
Thunderbolts follows Yelena (White Widow, from the movie Black Widow) as she is dissatisfied with her clandestine spy work for Valentina (an evil mastermind of sorts who heads the CIA and funny enough looks similar to Tulsi Gabbard) who takes one last job to clear her name and start a new life. Before this mission, she seeks some advice from her loser father, Red Guardian (Soviet Captain America), who despite formerly being Soviet star is now just a boomer washout reminiscing his good old days, living in filth, ordering DoorDash and driving limousine as his job. This meeting is unsatisfactory, so she decided to take the job. That would've been a good setup for a Hallmark-style unfulfilling work focus to romance, but no.
There, she meets the rest of the villains, proceed to fight (Valentina wants to get rid of them since they're no-longer-useful loose ends) and sort of team up when they figure out the plan. John Walker (2nd Captain America, government issued, controlled and discarded from Falcon and Winter Soldier), Ghost ( another female villain, basically a life long lab rat from Ant-Man 2) and the mysterious, seemingly normal Bob.
This Bob guy is a depressive successful experiment of Valentina unbeknownst to the main cast until the 3rd act. We get hints of this when the cast interacts with him throughout the movie and they have visions of their worst moments. Yelena remembers her brutal and traumatic training as a child in the Soviet Black Widow programme but John remembers... his divorce. Specifically, the scene is him doomscrolling on his phone in one hand with his baby in the other while his wife shouts at him asking him if he's watching the baby. Almost all the characters disrespect him ("dime store Cap", "Junior Varsity Captain America"). This guy was a 3 medal soldier, media darling, selected as the new Captain America by the US government and got cancelled after
I hoped during the movie that John and Yelena would end up together. They both are sort of former villains trying to change, unhappy with how they are perceived compared what they feel they could/should be. The fallen hero and the ascending villain. Both seeking redemption. But no, that didn't happen. And John having an ex-wife and a child isn't the reason, since Ant-Man is in a similar place in his first movie and still has a romantic relationship with the Wasp. Everytime there could be some flirting between the two, Yelena or some other character either makes fun of him disrespects him in some other way, and he kind of lacks any response or has some really cringe ones. Think "You're a real bad boy, John" said in a flirty manner by Yelena, to which John would respond with "A-Actually I'm a man". Although not an actual line in the movie, it wouldn't seem out of place. Every line or quip he is facing against, he comes off as obtuse and mismatched. Imagine a 27 year old model talking to a college freshman, who also gets clowned and dismissed by almost everyone.
Yelena does have some mommy-dom scenes with Bob (whose alter ego Void, is the villain of the movie), but no romance there either. Bob is depressive and lonely, and John gives him a hard time for a bit, but even there he seems outclassed. When he tells Bob he's Captain America, he laughs and when pressed about his reaction, he says "Cause you're an asshole". Yelena is sort of protective of Bob, in a big sister way, which towards the end I thought might turn romantic (you know, the Femme Fatale and soft guy type of relationship, that is, I guess, not unheard of in fiction) but no. She looks after him and is instrumental in helping him take back control over his body from the Void, but it's more like a found family type of thing.
It's feels weird, not just because it breaks the previous established formula of the hero gets the girl, but these characters are pretty much at their physical peak with extraordinary skills. In the real world, when top athletes are put together during the Olympics, well you can guess what happens.
The characters form a team at the end of the movie, but I don't think romance is going to be explored based off the recent trend.
In Shang-Chi, the namesake character has a girl best friend with whom he gets drunk and has friend activities (working low end jobs, getting drunk, karaoke). At the end, after he saves the world together with his best friend, his grandma hints at a possible relationship/marriage between the 2 which is shut down immediately by both of them.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier also lacks romance, with the discourse around that time being the shipping of the two (male) protagonists, which got shut down fast by Anthony Mackie (Falcon). Speaking of him, I don't think he had any romantic relationships in the few projects he appeared; most recently he starred in Captain America: Brave New World, where he fights the Thunderbolt Ross (as the Red Hulk. See, Ross is the Hulk's antagonist in the Hulk movie. He also hates Bruce Banner (the, um, Hulk) as he doesn't approve of him dating his daughter, Betty. Again, the relationship isn't really explored past the first installment, and the Black Widow sort of takes the role of "woman who calms the Hulk down" from Betty Ross but I don't think they ever really dated or kissed on-screen. There were certainly some more emotional scenes between them, but if I remember correctly, any actual dating, if it happened, is just referred to in dialogue. But Betty comes back to talk to her (previously estranged) father. Anthony Mackie's character has no romantic subplot, nor does it seem he is interested in any.
Usually, these big action blockbusters have a romantic subplot so the wives/girlfriends have something to care about during all the fights and explosions happening all around. Even their big hit in the last few years, Deadpool and Wolverine, lacked any romantic subplot. Ant-Man and Wasp marry, but there is barely any romance. Even their most successful relationship, Ironman and Pepper Potts, is an afterthought. To say nothing of how the Thor franchise handled the main relationship. Diminishing screen time and maybe throwaway lines during the big team-ups.
Keep in mind that in the comics characters, especially protagonists, have a bunch of love interests that they jump between. Here is how Spider-Man was portrayed (accurately) in Marvel Ultimate Alliance at 10:38 (spoilers for a 20 year old game)
The current Spider-Man has a relationship with MJ which is basically best friends who occasionally kiss. Here is a list of Spider-Man's love interests (spoilers for the comics).
I know there are counterexamples both in and out of the superhero genre. But given how prominent the genre is to movies, especially action/adventure movies, this to me seems way more than just an accidental occurrence.
I guess my questions are if you think that the romantic interest is the new "parents problem" that young protagonists have (which is why they are disproportionately orphans or estranged or never mentioned) and if so, is this a recent development due to less interest by younger generations in romance/dating/sex?
My point is that it doesn't need much additional runtime, just the dialogue in the existing scenes between the two being changed and I guess one short scene of them kissing or whatever.
I always thought the monster was about how dangerous a man can seem/be to women, and how in a marriage he mellows out due to getting to know him better in a romantic context.
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