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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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It seems clear that it’s Marvel fatigue rather than wokeness or the casting.

I think this is probably most of the issue: there have been lots of MCU movies and the universe as a whole has changed so much it's hard for people outside of the fandom to keep up. Someone watching Iron Man cold in 2008 saw a very familiar world with American weapons in Afghanistan being a major part of the plot. Someone watching anything after Endgame needs to know that half of everyone disappeared for a year or two. Lately I've been thinking it would have been better to have Endgame end in an even larger reset to a world more like our own: Marvel is trapped in a huge escalation loop where each villain of the week has to threaten even bigger than the one before. Either force the heroes into hiding (a la The Incredibles) after their final victory or somehow resolve the time travel to undo the whole thing, or some combination of the two: there's a chance for cameos of the familiar actors, but also re-telling the origin story of a new character playing a new take on a familiar hero.

Honestly, you can see some evidence they tried to go that way (trying to pass the mantle of Captain America in one of the TV shows, and the hammer of Thor), but it feels like they weren't willing to commit to the bit and either (1) tell a smaller-scoped origin story against smaller enemies and (2) commit to writing off familiar characters and starting over.

Although I did see an interesting take on the wokeness claim that the MCU has stopped or slowed showing shirtless male superheroes of late, which had been a fairly constant feature of the early movies. I don't get much out of male eye candy personally, so I'm not sure I had noticed its absence, or its effect on the other half of the potential audience. I will say that all the most recent heroes are almost visually uninteresting in matching full-body spandex suits, only differing in colors and patterns, which is perhaps related (and they all shoot beams of different colors of light).