For some reason I’ve just never liked Spider-Man. He comes off as a whiney, ignorant child that never seems to grow up or mature despite everything he goes through. I love a good coming of age story, but he just never seems to become an adult.
Tony Stark - oligarchic propagandist for normalizing the myth of exceptionalism
I like him because he would loudly agree with you, then let you pick one of his sports cars for having the balls to call him out.
The thing about his movie is that he was like, almost okay. Iron Man I was about him learning that selling weapons = bad. He could have continued his moral development.
Instead, we got him fighting Captain America over a very stupid implementation of ‘oversight’ (coming from the guy who refuses to let gov. oversee his iron man development), being creepy to some random boy he just met (actually twice - first Peter and then some kid I don’t remember; in a better set of movies I don’t think Peter would be very thrilled to realize Iron Man was advocating for Peter to get outed in a national registry), and having a snit fit about how he doesn’t want to help Unsnap people who died because he personally is OK with his future with his daughter who may or may not be a robot he built to mime having humanity.What makes him really insufferable for me is his fans who think Captain America is EVIL for daring to snub poor Tony, and that Tony should go date Loki (no I’m not kidding; while I am happy with Loki being queer, I really can’t see the Marvel Universe Tony being a good date for, well, anyone ever, nor Loki being a good date until he works out his genocidal tendency issues at which point he threatens to become alas a much less interesting character).
Eh, people only fawn over him because RDJ is just perfect in the role, and in a way marked his comeback from some really public struggles.
Chris Evans is great (and a huuunk!) but he’s was/is much younger and plays the role of Government-BrandedHeroWhoIsBasicallyJustSoldierWhoAteHisWheaties.
Chris does the job well, but I mean, RDJ kills, and IMHO is a massive reason marvel got to continue making movies.
his daughter who may or may not be a robot he built to mime having humanity
First time I’ve ever heard of this. It it alluded to in the film? My initial reaction is that it couldn’t be true, simply because Pepper wouldn’t be willing to play along.
They made that up to be edgy
Stark was literally written to be a character that people should by all rights despise but was nonetheless a hero. That was entirely the point of him.
Also Batman.
Superman. He just does everything and wins. Unless you show him a green rock.
It’s stupid. I don’t understand how it ever interested anyone.
First, the appeal of Superman is his heart more than his strength. There’s one comic where he fights a giant robot and stops a runaway train, but the scene everyone remembers is when he talked someone down from the edge of a building.
Second, Superman may be invincible, but Lois Lane isn’t. It’s easy to defeat a villain, but much harder to defeat them while also keeping Lois safe. And she actively invites danger, so it’s always tricky keeping her safe.
Third, not every problem can be punched. Luthor’s greatest weapon against Superman isn’t kryptonite; it’s Public Relations. You can punch a monster, but that won’t help you stop a smear campaign.
He’s OK if you stick to classic Superman. He wasn’t a god, back then. Couldn’t turn back time, out-speed The Flash, or fly into the sun and pupate for a hundred years into some ultimate being.
He became increasingly absurd over the years.
I’m a big fan of Supes myself, but it depends on who’s writing him and what the goal is.
He is at his best when it’s a problem he can’t punch away, it’s about courage, and honor of defending others. Superman without powers is still the same stand up powerful character, that is crux of what makes him interesting.
I love the version of Superman where he growing up and is friends with Luthor and he’s like ‘I cannot tell him my secret because my dad would disapprove’ and it’s got accidental closeted queer vibes.
And there’s this comic book (not in the same continuity) where Luthor is this mad genius who escapes from prison easily and Clark interviews him and he’s like “I like you Clark, you’re so humble and down to Earth, but I hate Superman who is the opposite of that.”
and then Lois likes Superman more than Clark, at least to start with, in some versions I think.
And then with Brainiac there’s the possible storyline of ‘this computer has a lot of information stored on my lost culture but he is also an existential risk to all sapients everywhere in the galaxy ahhhhggg’.
And how will Clark deal with an environment where everyone is hostile to immigrants when he is one himself and also dedicated to upholding the law?
And the first comic where he interacts with Batman is actually fairly good: Batman threatens to bomb people if Superman unmasks him and Superman is like ‘oh shit, he is not lying, I can hear his heartbeat’, but Batman was actually threatening to explode himself. And the cartoon where Batman is fighting Brainiac and his costume gets ripped to reveal he was Superman all along was hilarious: “I did not predict this possibility.” The Justice League series in general (part of the same continuity) was pretty good actually.I like the potential stories there. There’s so many emotional possibilities. Stories where he just punches stuff are indeed boring. He is, frankly, under-utilized as a character imo because many writers don’t understand that, or think the solution is to make a version of him that is evil which still involves him punching stuff, or because they’re scared to actually touch on political issues like immigration or queerness. (can you imagine how many people would explode if Luthor was an ex-boyfriend for both him and Lois and they bonded over how shitty Luthor was as a date lol.)
it’s his ideals make him interesting, his nemesis litterally is an evil billonaire
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you are too focussed on the x vs y aspect of the stories. To me fights are the least interesting part you should read all star superman
Yeah, I don’t think that it’s a fantastic recipe for a character. The powers restrict the plots.
I think that less-potent powers tend to make for better story.
A lot of fictional series in various formats – not just comic books – make characters or events more-important or more-powerful over the course of the series, to top each previous episode, and I think that the plots tend to become increasingly constrained late in a lot of series.
It’s stupid because you don’t understand it? Aeems like you are the dumb one then.
Jane Foster when she was the wielder of Mjolnir. Not for anything about her personally, but the fact that Thor was treated as a codename. It’s the dude’s actual name, it’d be like if Sam Wilson went around introducing himself as Steve Rogers when he took the Captain America mantle. It’s happened a few other times like with Eric Masterson, but at least he had the excuse that for most of the time he used the name he and the actual Thor were sharing a body.
I think it’s both, his name and his power. In Thor 1 when Odin sends Mjolnir to earth he whispers to it something like “May he who’s been worthy possess the power of Thor”.
Yeah, I don’t mind it. Thor is a name and a title/power. God (presumably) is a name, and Thor has the power of a god.
Prince is a title. It’s also a name. And, to some musicians, Prince is a god.
It’d be rare to win an argument by invoking Prince, but there you go.
Well wait then how come Steve Rogers doesn’t have the full kit?
Because the point was to show that he’s worthy without completely changing him. Same with vision.
I thought vision was able to lift the hammer because he wasn’t a living being? At least I came to that conclusion because he never possessed the “power of Thor”
Vision is alive. His body is composed of living tissue woven together with the mind stone and vibranium. That whole speel by Stark arguing that vision could only lift the hammer in the same way an elevator would was him rationalizing why his creation was worthy but he wasn’t. The whole point of the scene where vision lifted the hammer for the first time was to show that he could be trusted. Because at that point, almost everyone had their doubts.
Excuse me, but that’s always been the case. The first ever appearance of Thor is in Journey into Mistery #83, that’s before he had his own comic, in that comic a guy called Don Blake finds a cane, and when he grabs it this happens https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/journey-into-mystery-83-thor-debut-1.jpg
So Thor has always been the title of the person in possession of the Hammer, he converts himself into Thor by grabbing the hammer, the movies then changed that because in the Marvel Ultimate universe it’s different, but Jane Foster is from the original comics, where holding the hammer made you Thor, and she did exactly that in the 70s, just a couple of decades after Don Blake.
Marvel ran a miniseries called “Battleworld.” Yadda yadda, Dr. Doom a single planet composed of all the different Marvel timelines. The police force controlling everything is the Thor Corps, which includes dozens of different iterations of Thor, including a Groot Thor.
The Flash.
Not because I don’t like the character but because he honestly should be one of the strongest characters in DC but they constantly nerf him in the writing because they realized just like superman he could literally just show up and fix everything before anyone else even realized there was a problem
This annoys the shit out of me. I don’t care if you nerf your speedsters, at least make them consistent.
Don’t hate spiderman. Hate the writers roughly since 2000 that only let him have a break from misery when he’s in an alternate universe where he never became spider man.
Having been introduced to Spider-Man through comic books, I always disliked him. And the comics came out well prior to the 2000s. I always just found him obnoxious.
To be fair the comics do him much worse, he kills his first girlfriend trying to save her, he kills his wife with his radioactive sperm, he’s the ultimate tragic hero.
However I don’t think that’s what OP is talking about, I think he’s talking about how it keeps getting rebooted so Peter Parker never grows old, he’s forever a teenager. In the comics it took time, but he did eventually become an adult, during the Civil War he’s an adult for example.
Batman. He’s a billionaire playboy living in a city full of poverty. He may not kill but he has no problem crippling someone for life. And the fact he apparently learns nothing about the joker over the decades has resulted in so so many people dying to the joker’s schemes.
And the reality is that he’s still that same child in that alley but in an adult’s body. He takes on different child robins because he never grew past that. He has trauma that was never treated and one of the main symptoms of trauma is being stuck in the time period that the trauma happened. He doesn’t really have a personality beyond the trauma.
Batman, tries to solve the cities problems by getting himself a load of expensive toys.
He spends a lot on “normal” help for the city, but people don’t know this because they don’t read the comics.
Rich man who could do more good by not hoarding wealth plays dress up instead.
Ah yes, the good old take from people who never read a comic book
Ah yes, the Batman apologist
While arguably Batman could use his wealth better (especially in versions where he’s richer than Luthor, because you don’t get to be richest guy without being a major asshole who does things like force workers to pee in bottles), the other guy/gal also has a point. The comic book universe isn’t our universe, it has aliens invading and Spwecial People who have to be fought by other special people. Batman is basically super-powered the way he can run a marathon, run a chemical analysis and synthesize a new cure for something overnight, and jump 10 feet, they just pretend otherwise.
You might enjoy Harley Quinn where Batman gets arrested for tax fraud.
He also does put money into trying to fix the city. Gotham is canonically cursed like five times over. No matter how much cash you mainline into the city it’s not going to get better.
All of them. Can’t stand the superhero-dominated media market.
I agree, they are just not for me either… It just feels the cinema industry focusing on what is safe to sell well enough.
Maybe the original material (comics) is way better than what I could see on TV growing in the 90s , not sure.
Yeah it’s just such a simple and easy topic. Studios funnel all their money and focus into a genre that requires no creativity.
After Iron Man 2008, sure it was neat for a few years to see a “connected universe” but it’s a bit of a joke now…
That’s what makes me the most excited for auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola or Lynch or Aronofsky or Tarkovsky - I watch movies to be immersed and feel something, and blam-blam-boom-booms have just never done it for me.
I prefer film-as-art over film-as-entertainment I guess?
Fuck, you are so cool. Edgy and cool. Too cool to like a single super hero which are diverse and many! Finger guns Please, dunk my nerd face in the trashcan.
The Flash. No list of reasons. Just never appealed to me at all.
Specifically Ezra Miller. God damn, fuck that guy.
I really can’t stand Damian Wayne I just find him annoying and bratty.
If anyone has any good story recommendations with him I would like to hear about it.
At first I thought you said Damon Wayans, and for the first time in ever, I thought about the movie Blankman.
My first thought too! How could you talk shit on Blankman? J5!
johnny five?
That’s why I liked Super Sons so much. Damians saltiness gets perfectly balanced out by Jon’s sweetness.
That’s also why Bats amd Supes are such a good duo, they play off each other and through that complete each other.
Damn you Brandis for taking Super Sons from us Angrily shakes fist at sky
That sounds good, I look into it. I do love Bat and Super team up, and it sounds like it can be similar.
I recommend Batman and Robin by Tomasi & Gleason. What’s great about Damian being annoying and bratty is that it allows some character growth. Unfortunately, whenever a new writer takes over, it results in him regressing back to his previous characterization.
I also recommend Batman and Robi n with Dick Grayson as Batman. Its has an unique take on Dynamic Duo with a serious Robin and Light-hearted Batman.
If you like those you can check out Robin Solo run and supersons as well.
I check those out, another person also recommend supersons, and I will look into it it sounds like something I would like.
Stories where someone slaps the dogshit out of him?
Deadpool. He’s not funny, he’s just obnoxious.
That’s kind of the point of Deadpool, though.
He has really departed from the way he was written in the beginning. Becoming popular forced the character to be written shallow.
Cyclops. What a toolbox.
And in the X-Men ‘97 reboot, WOW! have they ramped up the toolbox factor.
I can’t think of the name, but that one superhero that wears the funny outfit.
Do you have any idea how little that narrowed it down?
Sorry, I was being facetious. Probably was drinking at the time.
Hulk. He’s an angry green guy with muscles, created with gamma radiation, nothing special. After a while, he feels less like a super hero and more like a Super Smash Bros fighter.
For this same reason, he’s one of my favorites.
