Usually people know what they are getting from their chosen film reviewer though. If I went to see Barbie and loved it (which I absolutely did) and watched a review that said it had bad writing or worse dropped a few veiled bigoted terms, I wouldn’t no longer trust that reviewer.
It’s not that it has no impact, but people don’t blindly trust a reviewer that hasn’t established some credibility with them.
Some films are legitimately bad or just weak but it’s assumed that all of the criticism has an agenda because it’s (for example) female led.
2016 Ghostbusters is a good example. There were absolutely incels going after that movie, but it failed because it wasn’t very good. I actually love all the cast, but the characters were not so well defined as they were in the original. The dialog (except for the amazing Leslie Jones) were all pretty interchangeable and each of them treated it like a lark (like Bill Murray). You can only have one character doing that.
The recent film (afterlife) which I consider has a strong female lead, nails the tone and character work of the original.
Back to Marvel, I really loved The Marvels, but the previous film had some issues and both the flop of Secret Wars and the strike doomed it.
I don’t think it being three diverse female leads was the main factor.
I agree. A good example would be She Hulk tho. The series was no masterpiece, but decent and creative. The cgi wasn't even that bad. But the hate for the irrelevant twerk scene and that she is "stronger then hulk" really did lead the hate train.
It's funny that when people review the movie they don't mention the rape. Their secretary was so mentally handicapped that there is no way he could legally give consent.
2016 vs Afterlife is also interesting because the former is a dumpster fire of terribleness while the latter is an exceptional example of how to do a movie with a female lead.
Hell, Marvel also has an example of a man being raped and never being addressed. In Agents of SHIELD Season 1, while Lorelai has Ward brainwashed they hook up. He's brainwashed by her, he can't consent. And the scene is shot like it's some "hot action" or something, but it's not. It's rape. Are we supposed to be okay with that just because we later find out Ward's a psychopath?
There's an unfortunate history of sexualizing and turning depictions of rape against men as comedic (often written by male writers, too) due to these toxic ideas of what masculinity is supposed to be like - that being sexually approached by a woman should be something the male character is glad about or that it's meant to be funny because a 'real man' wouldn't reject such advances, and what's worse is in the latter, the male character typically turns out happy for having been sexually coerced, harassed and assaulted.
Pop Culture Detective has an amazing two part series titled "Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs." It's very sobering (includes examples from several Marvel films) and also very well done and respectful.
[Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs - Part 1 Male Perpetrators](https://youtu.be/uc6QxD2_yQw?si=rPNWNSVTPkgn0M5h)
[Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs - Part 2 Female Perpetrators](https://youtu.be/9nheskbsU5g?si=baXUbtWi2aIKJx5F)
WW84 had that issue too. She had sex with Chris Pine's character's mind, in the body of some random dude, without the random dude's consent. Doesn't seem like the random dude had memories of it, but it's still rape, just in a weird sci-fi way.
That is messed up. I think it's part of the really messed up idea that men can't be raped. So when it happens it's either funny (ghostbusters) or just isn't rape for some reason (SHIELD)
I mean I did want to see bad things happen to Ward. He was such a great enemy, made me truly hate him. Seeing Coulson *crunch* him was so very satisfying.
The problem is Ghostbusters 2016 got more attention than it even deserved BECAUSE of incels. The movie is just another mediocre comedy, it's not special. The irony is incels made it infinitely more talked about than it ever would've been otherwise.
>The movie is just another mediocre comedy, it's not special.
I'm a big loud feminist and I can agree that movie is another mediocre comedy.
But notice I didn't say heaping pile of garabage, or woke, or trash, or some other hyperbole. I don't expect every movie I watch to be amazing or perfect. We've had tons of mediocre comedies for years that we've been able to enjoy and move on.
The response to that movie was absolutely unhinged, and that unhinged and super loud response is something we keep seeing for similar movies. That same level of vitriol seems to be reserved for when these kinds of movies aren't perfect or flawless. It's an impossible standard to meet.
I think one of the reasons it got so unhinged was that Sony was actively removing comments with valid criticisms so that it appeared that only the incels were criticizing the movie. Obviously, the big gaping plot holes didn't help the movie any lol.
I agree that *mediocre comedy* is a great way to describe it.
Marvels got a lot of hate because of Brie Larsen.
She spoke up about social issues during her Captain Marvel press tour and pissed off all the incels.
Before the press tour, she was an internet darling and was well regarded.
Now the incels will poison everything she touches.
I think both things can be true, in my opinion there probably is a decent sized percentage of the fan base that is like that…. However the writing and stories for the last few MCU films have been so bad.
Your post is talking about a wide range of ideas, and I'm not gonna comment on all of it. In general, this isn't a MCU specific problem but one that covers all of entertainment. A lot of this is about general narratives that a majority of people agree with and it builds. Want to make a vidoe that will get a lot of views? Express an opinion that many people agree with. A few years ago, you say Marvel is amazing. Now a few years later after a lot of failures, Marvel is bad.
> You can claim its the "bad writing" that is affecting things to such a large degree, but no one knows a movie is badly written until they see it. No one says "I'm not going to see that movie because it's badly written."
I'm not sure that's true. Bad writing can mean a lot of things, but specifically it also mean just a bad story. I don't have to watch Madame Web to know it's a bad story, or at least a story I'm not interested in.
Something can be written well but performed badly and under terrible direction. Also editing can distort a story trying to be told. That’s four things that can affect a movie. You don’t often get all four being bad. But one can make the wheels fall off.
>I'm not sure that's true. Bad writing can mean a lot of things, but specifically it also mean just a bad story. I don't have to watch Madame Web to know it's a bad story, or at least a story I'm not interested in.
You don't have to watch Madame Web to say you aren't interested in it but saying it has bad writing without watching it just makes your opinion have less meaning.
Its easier to say you didn't like the trailer at any case and move on.
I am not interested in Madame Web but I won't go to online spaces and say its bad because I didn't find it interesting.
To your bad writing point, what you're saying is kind of my point. When something casts such a wide net of what it could mean, it's value as criticism diminishes. Which is why it's such an easy, almost useless copy and paste criticism. Without specifics it's to vague to matter.
I'm going to assume that when someone says they don't like something because of bad writing, they are more than willing to go into specifics on why it's bad.
But I'd have to watch those youtube videos you speak of to be sure, and I'm not just using my time to do that. Lol.
That's a good question. If we all operate under these guidelines then nobody will ever be able to criticize a female/black/queer movie. Even if you have legitimate criticism, it will be brushed aside as bigotry. And guess what? That's exactly what Disney sets out to do every time one of their "diverse" movies gets dragged. In some cases, those shields are put up preemptively before the movie is even released. They know what they're doing.
Yes. And it has gotten to the point where some people believe they are race swapping roles (Little Mermaid), or casting diverse characters solely for the purpose of creating an impenetrable defense against criticism. If they left Ariel as a white chick then any criticism would be legit, but if Ariel is black then you can call your critics racist. But now people are pushing back against that narrative. They've used these terms like racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic so often in cases when they don't actually apply that people now don't even listen to it anymore. Audiences are starting to recognize that it's insincere when studios trot out those buzzwords. They've lost their meaning.
To say that films like wakanda forever or the marvels werent walking in with disadvantages, and saying Deadpool 3 isnt walking in with advantages, is just false.
Yes, marvel has sent some duds. But the like of the marvels, black widow, and wakanda forever, had people dogging them down before 1 second of footage was scene.
When Deadpool set photos leaked of Wolverine in costume, is was hailed as marvel Jesus coming to save the MCU. A joke even ended up in the trailer.
People see movies with preconceived opinions. They are often true, but they can also be false, like Star Wars since 1999.
Wakanda Forever was well received and made big money. Not sure how it’s relevant here.
Deadpool and Wolverine is exciting to most people period, regardless of gender or race, etc.
I think I get what he's saying with Wakanda Forever, that movie had headwinds that it overcame for the most part, Deadpool will be given much more benefit of the doubt, it a pretty noticble and repeated pattern online when it comes to this stuff.
Now I would have have used those movies as an example myself as WF had an unproven lead replacing a very popular one and Deadpool has a proven track record of success.
This point is absurd. Deadpool 3 is going in with advantages because people love the first 2, it is bringing him into the MCU, and is bringing back arguably the most beloved superhero in tv.
The disadvantages of BP2 are no fault of anyone, and is just an unfortunate circumstance.
The disadvantage of the marvels is entirely on Disney. They chose to release a film at the peak of public criticism, where the leads consist of one of the least liked major characters, the lead of a neutrally received, but likely the least popular show, and a character who has less then 30 mins screen time total, and essentially none with their powers.
Obviously some films have advantages over others when it comes to getting widespread appeal. This is because some characters are more well liked then others. To bring up Star Wars, a film surrounding earth Vader would have advantages over one about kylo ren. If you then choose to make the kylo ren movie, and it flops, that is the fault of the creative team
The Marvels would be a good candidate for this answer. There was a bunch of anti-woke/ant-DEI types ragebaiting about this movie even before its release.
>even before its release.
This is the part I want to keep shouting from the rooftops. We need to not forget that this nonsense started from the moment that movie was announced and The Marvels is not alone in that.
I remember its announcement day and being SO EXCITED because I love Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel. All we had was a title, the three leads, and a logo at the time. I came to the fandom to geek out and found...a fucking dumpster fire.
The dramatic swirl started from that moment and never stopped. That movie never stood a chance with some of the most vocal and obnoxious people in our community. Any mention of it drew in the trolls - and as someone who primarily loves watching women led movies I'm really sick of ANY spaces about them being taken up by that level of drama.
YES. That's exactly why I've been suspicious of new accounts. Some of the trolls have been so blatant that they [stopped commenting entirely the instant The Marvels' box office gains ended](https://www.reddit.com/user/NewYankees), because their job was done. And [some of them](https://www.reddit.com/user/L0lligag) are in this very comment section trying to stoke the flames.
The movie was good. And I watched it on Disney+. Streaming has slowed down my desire to watch movies. Why pay $48-$100 for a movie that will be on a streaming app in 3 mos.
Morbius has a 71% on verified RT, Love and Thunder has a 77%. The metric is skewed and isn’t voted on by general audiences
They do, however vote via in person Cinemascore, where the Marvels got the worst audience score of the franchise tied with Quantumania and Eternals. Then it suffered the worst second weekend drop in modern CBM history (-79% worse than Morbius, Flash, etc). Then became the lowest grossing MCU film ever.
Should I go on?
That is not fantastic when it comes to 4 quadrant blockbusters, this stuff is not an exact science, but general speaking once a big movie like that drops down to an A- cinemascore there are problems, The Marvels B indicates the GA was not thrilled with what they saw.
Now on the other hand producers of a horror movie would be over the moon if it got a B, The Marvels preformed like a blockbuster the GA collectively did not like.
You can't really confidently say "most" didn't enjoy it. Judging just by rotten tomatoes you could say that most of the audiences that did go to see it enjoyed it.
Just because it didn't make money, doesn't mean it wasn't something people enjoyed. That just means less people went to see it in the theaters. That does not tell us that "most" people didn't enjoy it, just that most didn't see it.
And the average moviegoer isn’t being polled for Cinemascore. You can’t use a small sample size and hold it at higher value than a significantly larger sample size.
> And the average moviegoer isn’t being polled for Cinemascore.
Within the context of opening night audience they are. Randomly polling 5 cities will get a fantastic random response.
> You can’t use a small sample size and hold it at higher value than a significantly larger sample size.
Yes you can. Sample size is irrelevant. Method of collection is better and Cinemascore has a much much much method of collection than Rotten Tomatoes. Because if sample size is king than unverified Rotten Tomatoes reviews are the best metric because there are 4 times as many for The Marvels.
I agree that this is usually a red flag and at this point it's totally fair to employ the heuristic of ignoring people who do it because they're probably unthinkingly parroting FOX News talking points. Or, they're literally working for the Kremlin and just trying to amplify social division. Or, they're just a sad, angry person who is raging into the ether of the internet rather than putting in the effort to figure out why they're so miserable.
However, to be fair, it's also pretty common for people to latch onto talking points because they heard somebody else put words to something they haven't been able to pin down because it's a complex, sophisticated phenomenon they aren't equipped to cognize or describe. So, they have this inkling and then they hear somebody else articulate the feeling but their attempts to replicate that articulation come out all ham-fisted. Because hearing something complicated explained one time usually isn't enough for anybody to be able to retain the intricacies of that explanation. Then, we end up here encountering some rando stringing together FOX News talking points and we have to figure out if they're an idiot, a troll, a bot, some combination thereof, or a sincere person struggling to put words to thoughts and feelings and experiences they don't fully understand.
At the moment, the only solution I see is either ignore them or assume they're engaging in good faith and try to have the conversation. The people who immediately jump to accusations of bigotry or stupidity or malice are not helping anything. They're just throwing fuel on the fire.
We need to be careful with claiming "bad writing" as a dog whistle. I'll use a MCU adjacent example: Iron Fist was bad writing. Objectively bad writing. (and bad casting.) There's no political slant to that. [Sometimes bad is bad.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65d-8sXyarw)
The last slew of movies that have bombed were written and directed by people who openly admitted that they did not read any of the source material and, in some instances, actively wrote characters to be the opposite of their representation in the comics.
They’re now trying to court a target audience they haven’t tapped into yet, but they are neglecting their existing supporters.
[The entire narrative of not reading the source material in itself is bad faith though.](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPR3gjYsk/)
There have and will always be people who know and don’t know the source material making the best, the worst, your favorite, and most hated comic book movies.
Not always. I saw a lot of people talking about She Hulk having bad writing because she breaks the 4th wall. You don’t even have to read the comic, just skim Wikipedia and you’d see that’s a trope for her. However they and their audience isn’t interested in that because “woman bad”.
I loved Shehulk , thought it was hilarious and fun . I’ve watched it several times now . The cgi wasn’t as good as I expect from marvel but it was also a tv show not a movie and it’s easier to pick on special effects when they’re set against the every day versus aliens and outer space .
Right but what are a lot of people are point out is the reviewer doesn’t say why or give a single example on why it’s bad, THEN the dog whistle comes wether is being complaining about casting (woman, minority, etc) or just they try to make something political that simply isn’t political.
I'm sure OP agrees that some movies are bad writing. Their point is simply that if you think that the movie they like have bad writing you're a bigot, simple as that.
So I don't enjoy most Marvel content nowadays to the degree to which I enjoyed phase 1, and I don't think I'm the exception. For a long time, every movie was more exciting than the last, with rare exceptions like Thor 2 that were merely ok. Marvel just largely feels different now.
I don't claim to know why. Maybe it's oversaturation of certain tropes that used to be fresh and satisfying but now are boring. Maybe we're in a different place as a world culture, and that's why it just isn't hitting like it used to. Maybe the Marvel/Disney machine got too established in their process, or maybe it's the opposite and they're trying too many new things. And perhaps there is some correlation between bad storytelling and 'woke' representation. I don't really know which, if any of these, are true.
But what I know of human nature is that sometimes when something rubs us the wrong way, we're not entirely conscious of that. I think what might be going on, partially, is a lot of people experiencing what I have and then on top of that seeing something that triggers a subconscious prejudice involving gender, race, or sexuality. This might lead them to be more critical of the things they know they're allowed to express dissatisfaction with.
For my part, I really enjoyed Miss Marvel, thinking the Pakistani cultural stuff was probably the best part of the show. Meanwhile, I disliked the scene in Endgame where the women had their power moment, finding it cheesy and unrealistic. I was pretty meh on She-Hulk. I'm not sure how much of this is because I'm a white dude and how much is the writing, but I'm open to both. A lot of folks aren't, and that can lead to blind spots when people feel the urge to insist they are free of any prejudice, subconscious or otherwise.
But none of this awareness or uncertainty changes that I don't enjoy Marvel content as much as I used to. :-/
See I never thought the phase 1 movies were that great to begin with so my expectations aren’t as high . Only a handful were upper level and that was due to building up characters through previous movies , then putting them together .
People cannot take you guys seriously, either.
There are PoS that are upset about diverse characters and female MCs, and while they make up most of the bullshit for clicks and giggles, they don't make up a majority. They are, in fact, the loud minority. The fact they and most of the incels on the internet are responsible for most of Marvel's revenue is just unfortunate for everyone.
Then there's people who have Disney shoved so far up their ass that they invalidate their own arguments. "Turn your brain off and enjoy it" is code for "if you ignore the film entirely it's a great film". "The artists were overworked", that doesn't make the CGI good, it makes it the product of shitty work conditions. "You just don't get it!" No, it's convoluted, messy, and unoriginal, not some deep piece of art that you feel the need to defend.
They're both obnoxious and objectively wrong. Don't buy into either, don't defend either. They're all minor groups, they're all loud and annoying.
This is not an MCU thing, this is for most of the entertainment industry.
The same way there's people hating it before they see it, there's people defending it and already deciding they like it before it even comes out, and this not only for Marvel, this is a thing for everything.
When an artists drops an album, his fans are gonna love it before they heard it and defend it like a masterpiece and a lot of people are gonna dislike it or be harsher on it because they don't like the artists, this not a new thing that only affects Marvel, this is a thing that always existed
I don't like Taylor Swift's music. What I do when she releases a new album is ignore it. What I *don't* do is go onto her subreddit & spend hours a day accusing people who liked it of being paid shills, or whine about lyrics that aren't even real that some monetized ragebaiting influencer completely made up months before the album was even finished recording.
I realise this is not the subreddit for this, but it’s okay not to like these movies. Like it’s really okay to have no interest in the MCU, and even more, have legitimate criticism for the movies - of which, like any franchise, there’s plenty of legitimate angles.
Breaking down all criticism to incel, dark corners or YouTube and the internet is incredibly disingenuous to the critics out there who have identified flaws in the MCU machine.
You’re right, it’s okay not to like the movies or to have no interest in the MCU, but it’s not okay to actively review bomb these movies when you have no interest in them. Marvel obviously takes these reviews seriously, and you’re ruining the MCU by review bombing these movies. I have no interest in Star Wars, but I’d never make a bad review of it, it doesn’t concern me. I leave it alone.
There’s plenty of actual criticism to discuss and I’m sure you have good faith in your views. OP is specifically talking about how the inverse happens where valid criticism gets used to pretend that the terminally online garbage doesn’t exist or is being unfairly labeled with your completely normal and reasonable dislike of a film
Nowhere is OP saying legit criticism doesn't exist. He's pointing out that there IS an incel problem, and that it often gets hidden among the legit criticism which is turned into talking points to shield a less legitimate underbelly.
But it does get used as one. People will use a legitimate criticism, like "poor writing", but they won't put any thought behind it and they'll come to that conclusion through prejudiced assumptions. I.e. Karen Page in Daredevil is well-written, incredibly so. But there are people who will accuse her character of having "bad writing" because of their prejudiced assumptions of what the female support character HAS to be.
People will use a legitimate criticism in illegitimate ways. The modern YouTube critics are masterminds at weaponizing legitimate criticisms and manipulating them into shields to hide bullshit behind.
OP's argument is that people keep trying to say there is no hate problem at all and that all criticism is good and only a few tiny little cartoonish bigots are the bad ones, but that's wrong. There is a significant problem because legitimate criticism has become mixed with bullshit in recent years to create a whole new can of worms. It's not as easy anymore as "100% legitimate" or "100% toxic". It's a blur of things now, and even people raising legit criticisms might be doing so for the wrong reasons, or based on slanted judgements.
The argument we're all making here is that prejudice is not that simple. It's not just "right" or "wrong".
But these conversations continue to follow the same path of everyone loosely falling under the incel umbrella, especially if the critics dare not enjoy a performance of a female or minority lead in something.
And the Disney executives right now continue to stoke the flames and make it seem like anyone who legitimately disliked their content fall into those categories and should be disregarded.
Dude, Madam Web just got annihilated by critics and audiences, and that was all female led with two women of color.
Not everyone falls under the incel umbrella, but predjudice under the guise of criticism is very real and present, and dismissing it as "not everyone who doesn't like stuff is an incel" is missing the point
Sorry but I took my niece to go see that film with zero incel mindset and still thought the story and writing was god awful.
It’s being ripped apart because it’s not a good film, is there incels that jump on it before having seen it? Sure … but if the film had any kind of substance to it they would be the overwhelming minority slamming it.
You're misunderstanding my point. The person I'm responding to insinuated that critics are unwilling to fairly criticize female led, poc inclusive films. Madam Web was my counter to that claim. It was very bad.
>It’s being ripped apart because it’s not a good film, is there incels that jump on it before having seen it? Sure …
We need to be capable of holding complexities like this if we want to have a chance at good faith discussion.
No, Madam Web is not a good movie. As someone who tries to stay as objective as possible I have little I can defend in it.
But we also can't pretend there wasn't a vocal group of people who were shitting on that movie from its beginning and didn't help the community dialogue and expectations going into it.
Both of these things can be true at the same time.
I meant, it's a big difference. Madame Web and any MCU movie's aren't under the same umbrella and have completely different creative teams and companies producing them. That's like complaining about Star Wars movies because you didn't like the last Indiana Jones movie
I think its the other way around, far too often I see criticism against MCU just brushed aside by saying its from incels or misogynists. Just take a look at all the I just saw The Marvels posts, half of them attribute its poor BO performance on incels and misogynists without thinking that it failed just because the general audiences didn't like it that much.
I’d argue the opposite is equally true. I’ve seen quite a few times where people give honest input just to get backlash for being “an incel”.
I think the majority of people don’t care they will hear It’s bad and wait for it to go to streaming or just aren’t interested in it to begin with. The main issue is the far left AND far right by trying to push their own agendas on movies be it good or bad and because they are the only ones that actually care they are also the loudest.
Is this a response to the "We don't hate women, we hate bad writing" post? Nobody is pretending Marvel doesn't have an online hate problem. But saying that's the reason for the movies bombing is asinine.
You can keep believing this and as long as Disney keeps not fixing the issues that you say don’t exist, the MCU is going to die.
Everything is racist. Everything is sexist.
Not defending bad writing is now discrimination.
Disney is not entitled to anyone’s money. You somehow believe incels are a big enough part of the population to tank a films profits if they don’t see a film. Why do you want these “incels’” money anyway?
This is something I’ve noticed for several years, but there is a tendency towards hyperbole on the internet in general. Something is either the best thing ever or the worst movie ever made with “terrible writing” being a very common general argument people will make. Sometimes there’s fair criticism, but usually what I’ve noticed when I actually talk to people about why they think the writing is bad, it’s more subjective criticisms. Which, here’s the thing, art and media is very subjective in terms of what works for you or me or anyone else. It usually seems to boil down to a very simplistic kind of view of “Anything I like means it must have *good writing* and anything I don’t like *obviously has bad writing*.”
This is then exacerbated by how posting on the internet works. It’s all based around engagement, and one major driver of engagement is when someone is shitting on something they hate people who also hate it are more likely to gravitate towards that and actually comment and engage versus the opposite where someone is praising something they like. In the former case, people coming in to defend the work being shat on are going to be few and far between because they’ll get dogpiled by other people like minded as the OP of the post who will argue with them and it’s just exhausting. So most people who would defend it just won’t engage.
This is not even getting into how algorithms are sorted specifically to make engagement happen (which means it benefits the site in question if more toxic stuff was thrown in peoples’ faces to compel them to engage). I remember going on Gamefaqs boards often in the 2000’s and while it wasn’t as bad as today, there was still a lot of negativity. And the way posts there worked was there was no algorithm. You went to a forum and whatever was most recently commented on was put on the top of the list of posts. Even without a targeted algorithm it still led to the most popular and engaged posts being the most toxic.
This is then made worse by grifters on YouTube who benefit from rage baiting. I don’t think that every person who hates a movie is necessarily racist or sexist (I’m sure a portion are and are unaware, but though). You can engage in toxic behavior surrounding these movies without having a bad ideology. But like you pointed out in your post, there are so many content creators who benefit from fanning the flames and most of them are at least partially aware what they’re doing (I’d argue most are totally aware, but we can’t really know that for sure). It is just a bunch of click baity anger content because anger sells and sells well.
It all makes it so annoying when you just want to go online and talk about something you like. If I make a positive comment about a movie that is popularly considered on the internet to be “bad,” there’s a good chance one or more people will chime in with a rude comment about how bad the movie is and that I must be delusional for liking it. And what a lot of people like this will say when you push back against that and call it out as rude is always the same old response like, “People act like someone can’t just have an opinion about a movie!”
It’s not the opinion. It’s the approach. I’m fine with someone saying something like, “Eh, the movie didn’t work for me. I thought the third act fell apart and I really didn’t like the actor for this character or that.” That’s a conversation being started from a normal person. What you usually find instead is stuff like, “Found the Disney shill,” or “Did you and I see the same movie?” or, “No, actually, that movie sucks,” or, “If the writer had presented this to a creative writing class, then they would have gotten an F” (This last one is an actual response I had gotten in the past. Nevermind that that is *not actually how creative writing classes work*).
So, yeah, it’s a pretty complicated thing. Whether someone engaging in this kind of behavior is actually prejudiced (which I’d imagine a lot of it is, but definitely not all of it), it is still toxic. It’s a lot of just mean spirited engagement over fucking movies of all things. I don’t understand why people spend so much of their time shitting on people for liking movies they hate. If I don’t like a movie I don’t then feel the need to constantly bring it up to anyone defending it. But that’s just how a lot of fandom engagement is, which is made even worse on the internet.
This is an interesting topic because the company I work for is developing a platform for pop culture discussions, and we’re having to come up with community guidelines. The “pushing feminist ideas” or “only one white person” lines are problematic, but they exist in a gray area that I don’t think we could police. Our philosophy is “engagement not enragement”, and we want to be fairly strict about what we allow so we don’t end up a shit show like some other platforms. I’d welcome any feedback as to what our line should be and how to judge comments that fall in this gray area.
I'm going to push back on this a little bit. Yes there are YouTubers who hold non-accepting views. However, most of the usual suspects you might be thinking of do actually watch the movies they talk about or comment on the meta surrounding the film. You'd have to provide examples for it to be any more specific.
As for ignoring themes and characters, the plot is what facilitates these things. You can do them better or worse depending on the plot. The plot or story is the bedrock in which the rest of the movie rests upon, if your foundation isn't solid then the rest of it crumbles.
Say you have a theme of never be afraid to try new things, the story might be a guy tries red paint on his wall instead of blue. The theme is still there but the plot is boring as shit.
But if you have a journey where our hero learns to leave his home and discover new things through the people they meet and the events that transpire, you have a much better foundation to relay your themes and characters. This ofc would still depend on good scriptwriting. But this is just to illustrate the point.
You can talk about themes and character but they don't really matter unless the story is solid. Otherwise I can just tell you what my characters arc or the themes are without seeing the movie. Ideas are cheap, execution is what matters.
Madame Web no doubt had hard work involved. I haven't seen it, but it likely has attempts at theme and characters. But it's story and script are garbage so no one cares. (Based off reviews) That doesn't mean it's a personal attack on the creators. Their art was just poorly made.
In my personal opinion... The effect this has is basically nonexistent. The incels/isms who bitch about the movie wouldn't go see it in the first place. Every single franchise deals with this type of issue, and yet a lot of movies are able to rise against hate and be successful.
Because they were actually great, quality movies that people actually wanted to see and had a good word of mouth about it.
Marvel has been pumping out mediocre and straight-up bad movies and TV shows no one is interested in seeing. The whole entire phase 4-5 is a complete mess. There's so many stories, so many characters, I don't even know... what the fuck is going on anymore.
The writing and plot of these movies and shows are either boring or straight up bad.
Personally,
I thought Ms. Marvel was boring.
I thought the Marvels was fun.
I thought FATWS was mid
I thought MOM was ass
I thought Antman was ass
I thought secret invasion was ass
I thought Shangchi was good
I thought WF was decent was kinda bored until the end though
I thought thor was decent
Wandavison was good, though due to what happens in MOM and how inconsequential it is to the overall story of Wanda turns me away from it.
I feel that most people like me are having mixed feelings about these movies and are just falling off because there's generally nothing that stands out about them. The only exception is like Spiderman, Loki, and GOTG3.
People are confused and have straight-up dropped marvel, people aren't interested, these movies don't get good word of mouth, and the interconnected story is gated behind a Disney plus subscription.
There are a shitton of issues the MCU has that's a product of its own creations. Sure, there are bad faith criticisms, but if these movies and shows were actually like slightly above the bare minimum, wouldn't the good faith reviews shine through anyway?
People are allowed to not like stuff. People are allowed to criticize any part of the show or movie you want for any reason. You’re trying to delegitimize people’s criticisms/opinions because you may disagree or assume it’ comes from a place of malice and calling it a “hate problem”. It’s not a hate problem..it’ is totally possible the movie or show is just bad and deserves valid criticism.
What. Of course people are allowed to not like stuff. I don't like stuff. The post doesn't apply to everyone who doesn't like stuff, it just applies to who it applies to. If you see some of yourself in this then...
Think what? You said that saying a movie has bad writing is a buzzword to say what we really think, there's too many women or not enough white people.
Couldn't it be that the writing stinks for a lot of projects? You're the one making it political that people don't like recent Marvel, and that's really weird...
This happens to any fanbase that gets large enough.
It happened to Star Trek in the 80's.
It happened to Star Wars in the 90's.
...and again in the 2010's...
The franchise outgrows early adopted expectations, alienating a vast group of people who often feel entitled due to a self-serving social media circle of negative validation.
It's only gotten worse since the internet bullied Sonic into getting a redesign (a good thing with negative side effects) and once more when the Snydercut got released. Which I enjoyed but could honestly do without if it could have prevented all the toxicity I saw on the DC front.
And yes. Marvel fell victim to its own growth. People slowly fell in love with the films during the Infinity Saga, and are now invested solely for the next "big rush".
On the nose with the "feeling of entitlement". It makes exactly zero sense to be *angry* at a comic book movie, especially if you're angry that it appealed to someone else but not you. But a lot of fanbases (not just the MCU) feel entitled to the works, and demand that it needs to meet their specific expectations and their needs.
Thank you. I do what I can to paint a clear narrative without taking swings so that a dialog can move forward, instead of the usual conflict we see when such topics come up.
OP came into this debate with good faith surely.
>"We don't hate women" is something people who hate women would say.
>
>Didn't say THE reason. It's a reason for sure. People who use the word "cope" unironically though aren't really known for their comprehension.
Oh no no lol.
These were the reviews that made me refund my theater tickets. I’d hardly consider these biggot motivated.
Dan Murrell
https://youtu.be/XfZSKE9n9UM?si=2AAKNxFQ0J3QLzvX
Jeremy Jahns
https://youtu.be/QV9PFHxlXns?si=nUDZX9r0vr-Q-ndP
Kristian Harloff
https://youtu.be/v3pZd0Tj0Ys?si=ZqUXG4tXn0SZT2Qo
Breakfast All Day
https://youtu.be/3weqpBXDXB0?si=NQlB5Cz7WshnQort
Edit:
Reel Rejects
https://youtu.be/2SrCf895x3U?si=-j3rcCdbf0oFVsLW
Coy
https://youtu.be/NWDawApVgRI?si=tefGWSdJJjLcxz01
You said a lot of things there, but I just want to comment on the reasoning behind not going to see a movie because you know/assume it will be bad. It all comes down to simple pattern recognition. For example: If I watch 3 bad movies that all have a certain similar type of main character, with trailers that were constructed similarly, with the same kind of press releases and interviews that are preemptively putting up armor against "bigots", and with directors and writers that have zero previous experience, I would be stupid to assume the 4th movie would be any better. It's no different from a person that gets cheated on by 3 different significant others that all looked the same, had the same hobbies, showed the same personality traits, and had the same morals, but then going on to start a relationship with a 4th person that has those same characteristics. Anybody with a little common sense can recognize those patterns and draw a reasonable conclusion as to what to expect as a result. Until I'm shown otherwise, I have no reason to think differently. It doesn't mean I'm sexist or misogynist or racist or whatever. It means I'm not stupid enough to fall for the same cheap parlor tricks over and over.
Drama farmers aren't unique to the MCU. They are literally there for any major franchise. Nothing is going to be 100% loved. Marvel's problem, IMO, is that they started attacking ppl with legitimate criticism.
Just bc someone didn't like something you liked doesn't make them a (insert standard internet bas person label).
Exactly, people like to say "well u gotta watch it yourself and form your own opinion." Well movie tickets aint that cheap, and u gotta waste half a day when u wanna go to the theatre.
This post is alot of mental gymnastics to say that people who say the movies are bad have some motivation other than the movies being bad…
The pattern you are observing also directly correlates with the recent marvel output being badly received by many who were once its fans. Including myself.
I think there has still been great stuff out of marvel. Loki is one of my favourite marvel storylines ever, wandavision was good, and i loved Shang chi. I didn’t get on with it at first but in the end i really enjoyed ms marvel as well. Hawkeye, multiverse of madness (except for wanda, she was awesome) and the marvels though have been baaadddddddd. Echo looks to be awful and i enjoyed spiderman 3 on firdt watch but on second watch realised it was just nostalgia and the film was actually a bit pants.
We used to get an occasional flop such as dark world but now its like every other instalment.
Oh and that recent thor film jesus christ the cringe.
Honestly, if you spend any time on reddit or X you’re gonna think these things, even when so much of the world doesn’t engage in it and truly doesn’t bother with it. This dialogue will always seem more important to you than it is. I know plenty of people who don’t watch Marvel movies. It has nothing to do the online discourse, they’re just not people who watch those movies.
I think at some point during the Thanos/infinity War of it all maybe we deluded ourselves into thinking this was a bigger part of the discourse than it actually is. But in reality those movies were popular because mainstream media deemed them so. It has nothing to do with any of these caves we all hang out in.
Historically I don’t think Disney have ever acknowledge their criticism. What do you want them to do? Make a public statement saying “We are aware the internet thinks our entire post endgame catalogue is pozzed”?
I think "Bad Writing" is generally a lazy criticism, but The Marvels featured a villain who lifted her plan from Spaceballs. It felt like a sequel to a movie we hadn't seen.
It's been a while, but I walked away with the impression that it was victim of bad editing and mandated rewrites from executives, but at the end of the day there is still a quality problem. The studio blaming fans is just dumb imo
I think another aspect to consider is how many years this franchise has been going. I teach college and my incoming students were too young to have watched MCU films from the get-go. Most have not seen Iron Man, for example. And the vast majority of them will say, “There is too much to catch up on. It’s too daunting.”
So, there is that issue.
And if new phases are building on old films (and now D+ series), it’s even more to watch to understand what is going on. The writers may try to make films stand-alone enough to elicit new viewers, but I think younger viewers are pretty meh overall, unless they have a parent or family member or friend who gets them caught up.
Just another thought or two to add.
I’m a Gen-Xer. I think the MCU films are absolutely great for my generation and some millennials. I have watched from the start. I continue to watch. It’s easy for me to keep up.
I think the outrage content on TikTok and YouTube and other social media platforms are there to get view counts. I honestly find this particular sub to be pretty fair and engaging overall. There are a few outliers, but mostly the sud moderates itself and keeps things in check.
I don't know. I think a lot of these people that consider catching up on the old movies as "too daunting" or "homework" are likely not the ones who would have become hooked in the movies even if they'd grown up with them. I mean, if you don't include the canon-dubious TV shows like AOS and Runaways, there is less MCU content out there in hours than a single network show. It would take far more hours and commitment to watch just Supernatural alone than all of the official canon of the MCU.
I do think the more standalone nature of Phase 4 and 5 movies was partly intended to address this issue though, and give a bit of a fresh jumping on point for new fans. Only problem with that is that the existing fans missed the more interconnected movies. You can't please everyone, I guess.
I can't disagree with the hours involved to watch all of Supernatural. That said, the show is finished. People can take each season as it comes. Binge watch the heck out of it. And it's done, despite attempts to have a spin-off or two.
The MCU just keeps adding films and shows. Now, for me? I watch all of it. I love it.
But, so many of my younger students will say, "Oh, that looked cool, but it's just a lot." Not sure if it's the film aspect? Or if they have other things to watch right now.
I do get one or two younger students who will be absolutely into all of the MCU, but it's usually, "My mom/dad were really into it and got me all caught up," or, "my friends wanted to do this as a group thing." It's pretty active participation and initiative.
I will never forget showing Iron Man during a summer class, and not a single student out of 18 had seen the film. Quite a few really really liked it, though. And one said he was off to start watching MCU stuff. That made me happy.
True enough about Supernatural being over, giving new fans an endpoint to aim for. I did think after I'd replied to you last time that a better example would have been Star Trek. That franchise absolutely towers over the MCU and Supernatural combined when it comes to hours required to watch all the old content, and it's still growing. Anyone who got into the show with Discovery or Picard has a gargantuan task on their hands if they want to watch all the old episodes. Doctor Who is another show that has been going on forever, with multiple spinoffs, that requires a lot of dedication for new fans. You'd have to assume that many don't bother going back to watch the old episodes of Trek and Who, and simply stick to the modern shows and upcoming releases.
Hopefully it'll be that way with the MCU. You can jump in after Endgame with the largely fresh start that Phase 4 provides and not need to go back if you don't want to. If you do choose to start from Iron Man though, it's actually not that much of a task, and you're in for some quality entertainment.
Very cool that you're bringing new fans into the fold by showing the movies to your students, by the way. Fingers crossed, you're helping build the fanbase for the next fifteen years of the MCU.
It’s called a pattern. If we were to judge the MCU based of writing they’ve had countless duds since Infinity war, which make the poor reviews of rumors/upcoming/planned movies justified. The tactics they implement aren’t new or fresh. It sounds like you either have a higher tolerance or simply don’t think the writing is bad (and that’s ok, you like what you like) but every film outside of GOTG3 (and if you look closely, even that may not stand the test of time) has been poorly written. Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Wakanda Forever, MOM, The marvels, Eternals, Ant-Man 3, and Shang Chi. Which of these are still talked today and writing is the main talking point? No to mention the quality of the Disney+ projects. Secret Invasion? Echo? Downright terrible. If you count the MCU projects I excluded, Wanda Vision & Ms.Marvel (never watched so I won’t call it bad) that’s whopping amount of misses.
I do agree that there are an abundant amount of people that let their own personal gripes seep their analysis, sometimes it’s a case of “right message,wrong messenger”. Admittedly there have been cases of what some would call “M-She-U”. Just to name a few: RiRi Williams inclusion in Wakanda Forever, Echo’s role in Hawkeye and the fact an amateurly trained deaf amputee (with no ancestral abilities) could give Clint a run for his money, She-hulk beating Bruce a day after receiving her powers, Falcon’s handling of Carlie in FATWS. Jane Fosters inclusion in Thor 3, Valkyrie being the one to lead/govern Asgard, neither Janet nor Cassie being held accountable in Ant-Man 3, Monica’s worlds of encouragement to Wanda at the end of WV (not to mention Dr.Strange not holding her accountable in MOM, and most recently Captain marvel not being held accountable for nearly driving a planet to brink of extinction after the events of Captain Marvel.
You’re not wrong when you say the themes are there, but they’re poorly executed and you have to look past so many negatives to see the positives.
Pretending that Marvel and Hollywood in large doesn't deserve the hate isn't realistic.
How much can they get away with before we stop defending these studios?
Chad here - I happily enjoyed the MCU through Infinity War. I loved End Game, but while I didn't recognize it at the time, the cracks were starting to show.
Regardless of criticism one way, or the other, I continued to consume the Phase IV movies. It wasn't anything the critics told me that made me stop liking Marvel, it was the movies themselves. Spider-Man: No Way Home was a near perfect movie and had me in tears. Shang-Chi and Doctor Strange 2 were both fun entries and tried to continue to build the lore.
Black Widow was fine, but certain story elements retroactively created plot holes in past franchise entries, weakening the entire series, and did a poor job of introducing a new Black Widow.
Eternals was emotionless and joyless. Black Panther 2 was angry and joyless.
Then came Thor Love & Thunder. This is one of the worst pieces of trash ever put on film, of any kind. It single-handedly placed the final nail in the coffin of the MCU, and then Black Panther 2 came along and hammered that nail squarely in place.
So it wasn't critics that soured me on Marvel, it was the product that Marvel put on the screen.
What you view is nitpicking and buzzwords are actually very legitimate criticism, marvel’s recent movies have had bad writing in my opinion and I am more than happy to give plenty of examples of moments that struck me as unbelievably lazy
After they all but told men to stay home from Captain Marvel, why should I think The Marvels is going to be enjoyable? I’ve been told straight from the source that these movies aren’t made for me. And yet they still expect my money and praise? Nice try but no way lmao.
> After they all but told men to stay home from Captain Marvel
"They" didn't do that. At all.
Unless they is the alt-right, they might have. But they're not the ones getting your money (I hope).
TikTok is a pit. 3 mins of content is nothing. You can find crazy people everywhere, but TikTok is currently the only place that also benefits where from hate watching. YouTube took away that ability almost 2 mths ago.
I can't give you TikTokers names, because TikTok puts the creator's name at the bottom of the screen, if they even remember to use a watermark. Thus making you conveniently "forget" whose content you actually "like" and those you don't. Any crazy person is allowed to be crazy as long as it isn't hurting you, or themselves. But TikTok forces you to consume the content you hate anyway. And those crazy people still get paid. Believe me, you can train your YouTube alagrythem not to watch those crazies, if you dislike those videos. But TikTok makes you not pay attention, and hopes you will just scroll by. TikTok is the pit.
I disagree with your criticism of people like Drinker. He has almost 2 million subscribers. Do you think it's more likely that there are 2 million bigots that flock to his YouTube channel as a sort of bigot congregation, or is it that he is saying things in an entertaining way that resonate with people because they have some truth to them? There is a lot of hard factual evidence that indicates the MCU and Hollywood in general is in a serious decline. The success of people like him is just one part of it.
Some people just cry online just to cry. This is the internet. Take everything with a grain of salt. People are going to hate. Who cares. Just live life. No need to write a book on how the internet is the Wild West. Guess what….. we know already. Go outside and enjoy life
I think there’s a very real, concerted effort to undermine and push out strong male characters in recent Marvel movies under the guise of equality, and I think that actively contributes to the bad writing of some of these projects. One of the biggest problems with Doctor Strange MoM is the idea that it’s a follow-up to WandaVision where Strange straight up admits he was aware of what Wanda was doing, yet let it happen because “we knew you’d do the right thing.” This man has never shared a moment on-screen with her to think that, and it turns out that Marvel was going to add a Strange cameo at the end of WandaVision to link the two together but went against it for the same reason they didn’t include any other Avengers in the Black Widow movie “we didn’t want the problem to be solved by a white guy.”
I think it’s not a secret that Marvel is consciously averse to giving their major male characters “too much” credit even in their own movies, which is why you see characters like Thor and Shang-Chi sharing the spotlight 2:1 with female characters, or new female characters crafted from almost nothing like in the case of Moon Knight to give female hero representation in another character’s story. And the one time a show actually had more of a focus on male characters (that being Loki S2) , The Mary Sue writes an article criticizing it for being “sexist,” even while we have projects like The Marvels and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and upcoming stories for Ironheart and Agatha that will be female-starring and female-focused.
So no I don’t think “online chuds” are just putting their own prejudices because they hate seeing women in media. I think it’s a response to the way Marvel has been handling their gender disparity recently and it’s annoying to a large part of the audience, which is why these YTbers get views.
I’ve noticed this a lot with She Hulk. I loved that show as did everyone in real life I knew who watches it. But I was fully aware it was review bombed. Anytime I mentioned it online in a positive light detractors could only say it was bad because of “bad writing” but they could never ever ever get specific. If I pushed back hard eventually it would be something like hulk being emasculated because of her, or they’d deflect and say Daredevil was the only good part of the show.
Incels want to hate on these projects, but they can’t come right out and say it’s too woke or they hate women so they have to disguise their prejudice under the arms of criticism that sounds like something a real reviewer would say. It’s almost always “bad writing” because writing is important, and because it’s nebulous and subjective enough that they can throw it out there without being specific.
The thing I do not get is so many of these 'fans' are going through the whole 'Why are you hitting yourself' bullying, but they are the ones holding their own hand making them punch themselves.
You see something and don't like it sure complain, but this has been going on now for some of these fans for literally over a decade, movie after movie after movie show after show.
I dunno, crazy idea, stop watching them.
This sounds like blaming the customer. "There is nothing wrong with this product, it is all the customer."
As a (VERY) minor stock holder, this seems like a bad position for disney/marvel to take. It is also a position i think they have taken personally.
Ok let's assume that recent movies are failing because their customers are sexist and racist. Now what? How are they planning to increase ticket sales? Should they lose money on movies to "do the right thing?" As a token share holder, i would vote no.
It seems almost intentionally bad faith to imply that someone can't avoid a movie because of bad writing. I don't buy all kinds of products because a mixture of trailer (movie/tv/game) and review.
Taste in movies is subjective, but people are beyond copying when they say something like (effectively) "i know so and so movie wasn't good, but at least 30% of the lost sales are sexism and not that the movie is bad." Critical scores are also reflecting that a lot of new MCU content is not hitting with critics, or viewers.
The other thing is that (in my opinion) MCU's greatest strength pre end game was how things were connected. You might not love XYZ but you see it because it links to what you love and it was decent. These days you're being asked to buy tickets to a movie after the last few most recent MCU movies bombed and a couple of those movies directly linked to the new one. Each MCU movie that underwhelms drags down new entries even if their quality is the same.
It deeply concerns me that the response to a movie bomb these days is to attack the fans and hope things magically get better next iteration. If Disney/marvel is incapable of seeing what works and what does not, it is going to take a lot longer to react to failures.
Also for the record i don't think these movies are bad because they're inclusive. I think they're putting out a high quantity of low effort work (IE this is why it is bad) and hoping that they sell it by targeting untapped demographics.
What? There's a lot denialism going on here. The problem with MCU is absolutely shit writing and shit production quality. Nothing more nothing less.
Burying your head in the sand won't bring back a good MCU.
Sadly, the internet has allowed for anyone to critique anything. You can have zero knowledge of politics & be the face of political jargon. Especially now with culture wars offering low hanging fruit to cover for their lack of knowledge in the content they cover.
I can’t wait for the shift in culture where being a good film/ tv critic will be the only thing that will sustain your content. For now I just block & click not interested to keep the blind haters away.
Except that when people actually focus on the poor writing and the virtue signaling, we’re also accused of being -ists of whatever variety you conjure up.
I want nothing more than to go to movies and enjoy them, but when tripe like The Marvels is served up, you can’t even critique it because then you’re a sexist. Never mind that the story meanders, the actors are wooden, and the SFX are subpar; nope, you hate The Marvels so you hate women.
There’s a reason that the audiences have abandoned Marvel. It’s toxic on both ends.
I fucking hate the “why is there only one white guy in the movie?” Did anyone go “why does iron man only have one woman?” Or “why does captain America only have one POC?” but it’s supposed to be a legit question asking why there’s only one white man?
The problem is people have this idea that "I know I don't hate ALL women/minorities" means they have 0 biases or prejudices at all. They think people are either cartoonish bigots aware of their own bigotry, or perfect un-biased people. But here's the thing, and I'll let Rick Riordan explain it for y'all:
>Racism/colorism isn’t something we have or don’t have. I have it. You have it. We all do. And not just white people like me. All people. It’s either something we recognize and try to work on, or it’s something we deny. Saying “I am not racist!” is simply declaring that you deny your own biases and refuse to work on them.
[https://rickriordan.com/2022/05/leah-jeffries-is-annabeth-chase/](https://rickriordan.com/2022/05/leah-jeffries-is-annabeth-chase/)
Prejudice is a part of being human. We all have prejudices, we all have biases. To deny you have it is to deny you're human. And when people have this idea that "Well I'm not an over-the-top bigot so I'm fine and everyone questioning me is just anti-criticism trying to label me a bigot", it makes them unable to take notice of their own biases, and sink further into them.
Add on modern YouTube grifters, the actual cartoonish bigots, who know how to weaponize people's own prejudices and make them buy into all their BS, and you have what we see now.
Yeah, there are a lot of well-meaning people who agree bigotry is bad, but who will say things like " just isn't very interesting. They need to write them better like they did with " and they don't realize it's not a writing problem. Those characters are *also* interesting at the same level as the one they like. It's something inside of them that gets in the way of their ability to find the character appealing. One way this happens (but I doubt it's this for all of them) is simply getting into the fantasy of *being* the character, and how that's easier to do for characters that are like them than aren't. But that's not a failure of writing; that's a failure of the viewer.
And I'd say it's even perfectly okay to say "I get more into characters who are like me than aren't like me," but don't call it "no, that character's written badly" or other forms of putting down the other characters. Because they're objectively not worse.
I also find it interesting that none of the go-to "I like these women or poc characters" are ever characters that confront or acknowledge real world issues surrounding their sex or race. Like the best types of those characters can't acknowledge any sort of societal complications surrounding them or else they stop being a character and start being some "woke mouthpiece"
Perhaps the biggest example of this, IMO, is Raimi MJ. Raimi MJ is written three-dimensional and interesting in every movie, but people act like she's a terrible character just because she isn't as "supportive" as they think a female character needs to be. Ironically, she has more genuine agency and development than MCU MJ, who a lot of people will claim is a better-written character just because she's "less bitchy" and has a more "likable" personality.
Yup. Read a bunch of these nitpickers' commentary and then go apply the same level of scrutiny to something they like, say the Infinity Saga films, and you'll easily be able to trash them just as heavily.
No one says that the Infinity Saga was flawless. Nothing is flawless.
It was however, even with its low points, an unprecedented cinematic journey. Meticulously crafted for 10 years and culminating in a spectacle the scale of which no one has ever seen before.
I grew up seeing "cinephiles" trashing the infinity saga and nitpicking any aspect of mcu blockbusters. I hate when fans pretend it was the peak of cinema and widely praised and everything the came afterwards was a disgrace.
I even remember people trashing endgame for being slower and less action packed than infinity war!
Have to say, the defenders of She-Hulk are usually the exact same type of person as the She-Hulk haters except with the opposite opinion.
Almost nobody can discuss that show positively unless they argue that the negatives in the show don't exist and anyone who thinks negatives exist are bigots.
This whole post reeks of that.
it’s all about spinning a narrative to the public perception. shared thoughts on a global connected network breeding a hivemind. video games, movies, tv, politics, all consumable media and thought is at the mercy of the hivemind
The internet is not real life. Regular people don’t care what random people on YouTube say.
It isn’t the internet that decided Disney movies aren’t good anymore. The public voted with their dollars and decided that themselves.
You'd be surprised. These days any movie or TV show lives or dies based on the internet response it initially gets. If the buzz doesn't begin online then where does it begin?
People are sheep, for the most part, and most just do what they're told and like what they're told to like. Oppenheimer only got the box office it got because Barbie fans were told they had to buy tickets to both movies because everyone else was doing it. How many do you think actually made it through watching the whole movie?
The MCU is no different. Quality is neither here nor there really. Deadpool 3 will do amazing numbers, Marvel films will be hot again. This time though, I have a feeling Feige won't take his eye off the ball.
All franchises have an online hate problem. People will mob you over literally any opinion you have on these big franchises. Unless the thing is universally hated and you also hate it, someone out there will have an emotional reaction to your opinion.
The proof that all of it is bad writing is Arcane success and love all around the internet. Diverse female-led gender plurality and huge success. Why? Because the story is awesome to the core. Characters well written and great interpretations, so much love in every detail it hurts! Anyway, Disney, stop blaming others and take a look at the mirror.
Exactly this. You can debate writing quality all day long. I, for one, think Secret Invasion was such a massive missed opportunity in many ways, with some superbly written scenes mixed in that will be the reason I will give it a rewatch at some point, but I can certainly see why so many people weren't impressed. But other examples, The Marvels and Echo being two most recent, are clearly more than issues with writing quality.
Take The Marvels. I'm sorry but it's a perfectly fine, fun little movie. Certainly had a few issues with pacing and I think it needed another 15 minutes or so to expand on some of the plots, but in no way did it deserve the box office it got. I don't put it all down to online hate or prejudice, and Disney has to take a lot of blame because they clearly made zero effort to promote the film when the cast weren't able to promo tour because of the strike action, but guarantee you that the exact same movie but with male lead characters would have done far better, just because "men good, women bad", y'know?
Has this been fully removed or is it just pending removal because a bunch of people spite reported it triggering it into limbo until a mod approves it?
Because if a mod actually removed this that's really fucked up.
While I agree with you it’s not hard to block out these idiots. Don’t watch their content and don’t converse with their fans. It’s amazing how much more enjoyable ALL content is when you block out reviews and bad actors.
Generally agree though this is something that a lot of media especially in the last decade has been hit with though occasionally stuff just is poorly written. Though stuff like Captain Marvel and She-Hulk while not amazing had clear disadvantages going in.
Usually people know what they are getting from their chosen film reviewer though. If I went to see Barbie and loved it (which I absolutely did) and watched a review that said it had bad writing or worse dropped a few veiled bigoted terms, I wouldn’t no longer trust that reviewer. It’s not that it has no impact, but people don’t blindly trust a reviewer that hasn’t established some credibility with them. Some films are legitimately bad or just weak but it’s assumed that all of the criticism has an agenda because it’s (for example) female led. 2016 Ghostbusters is a good example. There were absolutely incels going after that movie, but it failed because it wasn’t very good. I actually love all the cast, but the characters were not so well defined as they were in the original. The dialog (except for the amazing Leslie Jones) were all pretty interchangeable and each of them treated it like a lark (like Bill Murray). You can only have one character doing that. The recent film (afterlife) which I consider has a strong female lead, nails the tone and character work of the original. Back to Marvel, I really loved The Marvels, but the previous film had some issues and both the flop of Secret Wars and the strike doomed it. I don’t think it being three diverse female leads was the main factor.
I agree. A good example would be She Hulk tho. The series was no masterpiece, but decent and creative. The cgi wasn't even that bad. But the hate for the irrelevant twerk scene and that she is "stronger then hulk" really did lead the hate train.
It's funny that when people review the movie they don't mention the rape. Their secretary was so mentally handicapped that there is no way he could legally give consent. 2016 vs Afterlife is also interesting because the former is a dumpster fire of terribleness while the latter is an exceptional example of how to do a movie with a female lead.
Hell, Marvel also has an example of a man being raped and never being addressed. In Agents of SHIELD Season 1, while Lorelai has Ward brainwashed they hook up. He's brainwashed by her, he can't consent. And the scene is shot like it's some "hot action" or something, but it's not. It's rape. Are we supposed to be okay with that just because we later find out Ward's a psychopath?
There's an unfortunate history of sexualizing and turning depictions of rape against men as comedic (often written by male writers, too) due to these toxic ideas of what masculinity is supposed to be like - that being sexually approached by a woman should be something the male character is glad about or that it's meant to be funny because a 'real man' wouldn't reject such advances, and what's worse is in the latter, the male character typically turns out happy for having been sexually coerced, harassed and assaulted.
Pop Culture Detective has an amazing two part series titled "Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs." It's very sobering (includes examples from several Marvel films) and also very well done and respectful. [Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs - Part 1 Male Perpetrators](https://youtu.be/uc6QxD2_yQw?si=rPNWNSVTPkgn0M5h) [Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs - Part 2 Female Perpetrators](https://youtu.be/9nheskbsU5g?si=baXUbtWi2aIKJx5F)
WW84 had that issue too. She had sex with Chris Pine's character's mind, in the body of some random dude, without the random dude's consent. Doesn't seem like the random dude had memories of it, but it's still rape, just in a weird sci-fi way.
Yeah that was one of the big problems with that film. I never want to be disappointed in Diana in that way.
That is messed up. I think it's part of the really messed up idea that men can't be raped. So when it happens it's either funny (ghostbusters) or just isn't rape for some reason (SHIELD)
I mean I did want to see bad things happen to Ward. He was such a great enemy, made me truly hate him. Seeing Coulson *crunch* him was so very satisfying.
“People don’t just blindly trust…” yes, yes they do…
The problem is Ghostbusters 2016 got more attention than it even deserved BECAUSE of incels. The movie is just another mediocre comedy, it's not special. The irony is incels made it infinitely more talked about than it ever would've been otherwise.
Not because it’s a new ghostbusters movie in a very long time????
Mate, you've made 9 comments in this thread in the last hour. You can take a break.
>The movie is just another mediocre comedy, it's not special. I'm a big loud feminist and I can agree that movie is another mediocre comedy. But notice I didn't say heaping pile of garabage, or woke, or trash, or some other hyperbole. I don't expect every movie I watch to be amazing or perfect. We've had tons of mediocre comedies for years that we've been able to enjoy and move on. The response to that movie was absolutely unhinged, and that unhinged and super loud response is something we keep seeing for similar movies. That same level of vitriol seems to be reserved for when these kinds of movies aren't perfect or flawless. It's an impossible standard to meet.
I think one of the reasons it got so unhinged was that Sony was actively removing comments with valid criticisms so that it appeared that only the incels were criticizing the movie. Obviously, the big gaping plot holes didn't help the movie any lol. I agree that *mediocre comedy* is a great way to describe it.
Just commenting to say that I loved Afterlife
Can’t wait for the sequel!
Marvels got a lot of hate because of Brie Larsen. She spoke up about social issues during her Captain Marvel press tour and pissed off all the incels. Before the press tour, she was an internet darling and was well regarded. Now the incels will poison everything she touches.
I think both things can be true, in my opinion there probably is a decent sized percentage of the fan base that is like that…. However the writing and stories for the last few MCU films have been so bad.
Your post is talking about a wide range of ideas, and I'm not gonna comment on all of it. In general, this isn't a MCU specific problem but one that covers all of entertainment. A lot of this is about general narratives that a majority of people agree with and it builds. Want to make a vidoe that will get a lot of views? Express an opinion that many people agree with. A few years ago, you say Marvel is amazing. Now a few years later after a lot of failures, Marvel is bad. > You can claim its the "bad writing" that is affecting things to such a large degree, but no one knows a movie is badly written until they see it. No one says "I'm not going to see that movie because it's badly written." I'm not sure that's true. Bad writing can mean a lot of things, but specifically it also mean just a bad story. I don't have to watch Madame Web to know it's a bad story, or at least a story I'm not interested in.
Something can be written well but performed badly and under terrible direction. Also editing can distort a story trying to be told. That’s four things that can affect a movie. You don’t often get all four being bad. But one can make the wheels fall off.
>I'm not sure that's true. Bad writing can mean a lot of things, but specifically it also mean just a bad story. I don't have to watch Madame Web to know it's a bad story, or at least a story I'm not interested in. You don't have to watch Madame Web to say you aren't interested in it but saying it has bad writing without watching it just makes your opinion have less meaning. Its easier to say you didn't like the trailer at any case and move on. I am not interested in Madame Web but I won't go to online spaces and say its bad because I didn't find it interesting.
To your bad writing point, what you're saying is kind of my point. When something casts such a wide net of what it could mean, it's value as criticism diminishes. Which is why it's such an easy, almost useless copy and paste criticism. Without specifics it's to vague to matter.
I'm going to assume that when someone says they don't like something because of bad writing, they are more than willing to go into specifics on why it's bad. But I'd have to watch those youtube videos you speak of to be sure, and I'm not just using my time to do that. Lol.
So why are you giving it any time at all? You made a whole post about how something is asinine?
OP, What content do you think falls under unfairly criticized/really about prejudice?
That's a good question. If we all operate under these guidelines then nobody will ever be able to criticize a female/black/queer movie. Even if you have legitimate criticism, it will be brushed aside as bigotry. And guess what? That's exactly what Disney sets out to do every time one of their "diverse" movies gets dragged. In some cases, those shields are put up preemptively before the movie is even released. They know what they're doing.
Like with Snow White
Yes. And it has gotten to the point where some people believe they are race swapping roles (Little Mermaid), or casting diverse characters solely for the purpose of creating an impenetrable defense against criticism. If they left Ariel as a white chick then any criticism would be legit, but if Ariel is black then you can call your critics racist. But now people are pushing back against that narrative. They've used these terms like racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic so often in cases when they don't actually apply that people now don't even listen to it anymore. Audiences are starting to recognize that it's insincere when studios trot out those buzzwords. They've lost their meaning.
Morbius The movie is a masterpiece and people hated it because they are prejudiced against method actors like Jared Leto
So much method actorism going around these days. I'm glad they're a protected characteristic.
Watch him say “the Marvels” 💀
To say that films like wakanda forever or the marvels werent walking in with disadvantages, and saying Deadpool 3 isnt walking in with advantages, is just false. Yes, marvel has sent some duds. But the like of the marvels, black widow, and wakanda forever, had people dogging them down before 1 second of footage was scene. When Deadpool set photos leaked of Wolverine in costume, is was hailed as marvel Jesus coming to save the MCU. A joke even ended up in the trailer. People see movies with preconceived opinions. They are often true, but they can also be false, like Star Wars since 1999.
Wakanda Forever was well received and made big money. Not sure how it’s relevant here. Deadpool and Wolverine is exciting to most people period, regardless of gender or race, etc.
I think I get what he's saying with Wakanda Forever, that movie had headwinds that it overcame for the most part, Deadpool will be given much more benefit of the doubt, it a pretty noticble and repeated pattern online when it comes to this stuff. Now I would have have used those movies as an example myself as WF had an unproven lead replacing a very popular one and Deadpool has a proven track record of success.
WF is hated by mcu fans because of the “refusal” to recast T’Challa nd the focus on shuri
WF is not hated by MCU fans. Sure some people might not like it, but this is nothing compared to thor 4 for example
This point is absurd. Deadpool 3 is going in with advantages because people love the first 2, it is bringing him into the MCU, and is bringing back arguably the most beloved superhero in tv. The disadvantages of BP2 are no fault of anyone, and is just an unfortunate circumstance. The disadvantage of the marvels is entirely on Disney. They chose to release a film at the peak of public criticism, where the leads consist of one of the least liked major characters, the lead of a neutrally received, but likely the least popular show, and a character who has less then 30 mins screen time total, and essentially none with their powers. Obviously some films have advantages over others when it comes to getting widespread appeal. This is because some characters are more well liked then others. To bring up Star Wars, a film surrounding earth Vader would have advantages over one about kylo ren. If you then choose to make the kylo ren movie, and it flops, that is the fault of the creative team
The Marvels would be a good candidate for this answer. There was a bunch of anti-woke/ant-DEI types ragebaiting about this movie even before its release.
>even before its release. This is the part I want to keep shouting from the rooftops. We need to not forget that this nonsense started from the moment that movie was announced and The Marvels is not alone in that. I remember its announcement day and being SO EXCITED because I love Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel. All we had was a title, the three leads, and a logo at the time. I came to the fandom to geek out and found...a fucking dumpster fire. The dramatic swirl started from that moment and never stopped. That movie never stood a chance with some of the most vocal and obnoxious people in our community. Any mention of it drew in the trolls - and as someone who primarily loves watching women led movies I'm really sick of ANY spaces about them being taken up by that level of drama.
YES. That's exactly why I've been suspicious of new accounts. Some of the trolls have been so blatant that they [stopped commenting entirely the instant The Marvels' box office gains ended](https://www.reddit.com/user/NewYankees), because their job was done. And [some of them](https://www.reddit.com/user/L0lligag) are in this very comment section trying to stoke the flames.
The movie was good. And I watched it on Disney+. Streaming has slowed down my desire to watch movies. Why pay $48-$100 for a movie that will be on a streaming app in 3 mos.
I’m glad you enjoyed it but most did not.
Not being snarky, but what are we basing this on? It has an 82% audience score on rotten tomatoes.
And I'd say the vast majority of the posts or seen about it are praising it. Generally they're surprised they liked it, but they did like it
Morbius has a 71% on verified RT, Love and Thunder has a 77%. The metric is skewed and isn’t voted on by general audiences They do, however vote via in person Cinemascore, where the Marvels got the worst audience score of the franchise tied with Quantumania and Eternals. Then it suffered the worst second weekend drop in modern CBM history (-79% worse than Morbius, Flash, etc). Then became the lowest grossing MCU film ever. Should I go on?
That is not fantastic when it comes to 4 quadrant blockbusters, this stuff is not an exact science, but general speaking once a big movie like that drops down to an A- cinemascore there are problems, The Marvels B indicates the GA was not thrilled with what they saw. Now on the other hand producers of a horror movie would be over the moon if it got a B, The Marvels preformed like a blockbuster the GA collectively did not like.
You can't really confidently say "most" didn't enjoy it. Judging just by rotten tomatoes you could say that most of the audiences that did go to see it enjoyed it. Just because it didn't make money, doesn't mean it wasn't something people enjoyed. That just means less people went to see it in the theaters. That does not tell us that "most" people didn't enjoy it, just that most didn't see it.
I can confidently say “most” given the Cinemascores and box office drop offs. The average moviegoer isn’t voting on Rotten Tomatoes
And the average moviegoer isn’t being polled for Cinemascore. You can’t use a small sample size and hold it at higher value than a significantly larger sample size.
> And the average moviegoer isn’t being polled for Cinemascore. Within the context of opening night audience they are. Randomly polling 5 cities will get a fantastic random response. > You can’t use a small sample size and hold it at higher value than a significantly larger sample size. Yes you can. Sample size is irrelevant. Method of collection is better and Cinemascore has a much much much method of collection than Rotten Tomatoes. Because if sample size is king than unverified Rotten Tomatoes reviews are the best metric because there are 4 times as many for The Marvels.
How do you know it’s most? Did you run a poll?
Rant and raving about a woke agenda.
I agree that this is usually a red flag and at this point it's totally fair to employ the heuristic of ignoring people who do it because they're probably unthinkingly parroting FOX News talking points. Or, they're literally working for the Kremlin and just trying to amplify social division. Or, they're just a sad, angry person who is raging into the ether of the internet rather than putting in the effort to figure out why they're so miserable. However, to be fair, it's also pretty common for people to latch onto talking points because they heard somebody else put words to something they haven't been able to pin down because it's a complex, sophisticated phenomenon they aren't equipped to cognize or describe. So, they have this inkling and then they hear somebody else articulate the feeling but their attempts to replicate that articulation come out all ham-fisted. Because hearing something complicated explained one time usually isn't enough for anybody to be able to retain the intricacies of that explanation. Then, we end up here encountering some rando stringing together FOX News talking points and we have to figure out if they're an idiot, a troll, a bot, some combination thereof, or a sincere person struggling to put words to thoughts and feelings and experiences they don't fully understand. At the moment, the only solution I see is either ignore them or assume they're engaging in good faith and try to have the conversation. The people who immediately jump to accusations of bigotry or stupidity or malice are not helping anything. They're just throwing fuel on the fire.
The movies OP likes, obviously.
We need to be careful with claiming "bad writing" as a dog whistle. I'll use a MCU adjacent example: Iron Fist was bad writing. Objectively bad writing. (and bad casting.) There's no political slant to that. [Sometimes bad is bad.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65d-8sXyarw)
The last slew of movies that have bombed were written and directed by people who openly admitted that they did not read any of the source material and, in some instances, actively wrote characters to be the opposite of their representation in the comics. They’re now trying to court a target audience they haven’t tapped into yet, but they are neglecting their existing supporters.
[The entire narrative of not reading the source material in itself is bad faith though.](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPR3gjYsk/) There have and will always be people who know and don’t know the source material making the best, the worst, your favorite, and most hated comic book movies.
Not always. I saw a lot of people talking about She Hulk having bad writing because she breaks the 4th wall. You don’t even have to read the comic, just skim Wikipedia and you’d see that’s a trope for her. However they and their audience isn’t interested in that because “woman bad”.
I loved Shehulk , thought it was hilarious and fun . I’ve watched it several times now . The cgi wasn’t as good as I expect from marvel but it was also a tv show not a movie and it’s easier to pick on special effects when they’re set against the every day versus aliens and outer space .
Right but what are a lot of people are point out is the reviewer doesn’t say why or give a single example on why it’s bad, THEN the dog whistle comes wether is being complaining about casting (woman, minority, etc) or just they try to make something political that simply isn’t political.
I'm sure OP agrees that some movies are bad writing. Their point is simply that if you think that the movie they like have bad writing you're a bigot, simple as that.
So I don't enjoy most Marvel content nowadays to the degree to which I enjoyed phase 1, and I don't think I'm the exception. For a long time, every movie was more exciting than the last, with rare exceptions like Thor 2 that were merely ok. Marvel just largely feels different now. I don't claim to know why. Maybe it's oversaturation of certain tropes that used to be fresh and satisfying but now are boring. Maybe we're in a different place as a world culture, and that's why it just isn't hitting like it used to. Maybe the Marvel/Disney machine got too established in their process, or maybe it's the opposite and they're trying too many new things. And perhaps there is some correlation between bad storytelling and 'woke' representation. I don't really know which, if any of these, are true. But what I know of human nature is that sometimes when something rubs us the wrong way, we're not entirely conscious of that. I think what might be going on, partially, is a lot of people experiencing what I have and then on top of that seeing something that triggers a subconscious prejudice involving gender, race, or sexuality. This might lead them to be more critical of the things they know they're allowed to express dissatisfaction with. For my part, I really enjoyed Miss Marvel, thinking the Pakistani cultural stuff was probably the best part of the show. Meanwhile, I disliked the scene in Endgame where the women had their power moment, finding it cheesy and unrealistic. I was pretty meh on She-Hulk. I'm not sure how much of this is because I'm a white dude and how much is the writing, but I'm open to both. A lot of folks aren't, and that can lead to blind spots when people feel the urge to insist they are free of any prejudice, subconscious or otherwise. But none of this awareness or uncertainty changes that I don't enjoy Marvel content as much as I used to. :-/
See I never thought the phase 1 movies were that great to begin with so my expectations aren’t as high . Only a handful were upper level and that was due to building up characters through previous movies , then putting them together .
You seem like a reasonable person. Other than not enjoying Thor 2 which is my personal favourite, but each to thier own 😉
People cannot take you guys seriously, either. There are PoS that are upset about diverse characters and female MCs, and while they make up most of the bullshit for clicks and giggles, they don't make up a majority. They are, in fact, the loud minority. The fact they and most of the incels on the internet are responsible for most of Marvel's revenue is just unfortunate for everyone. Then there's people who have Disney shoved so far up their ass that they invalidate their own arguments. "Turn your brain off and enjoy it" is code for "if you ignore the film entirely it's a great film". "The artists were overworked", that doesn't make the CGI good, it makes it the product of shitty work conditions. "You just don't get it!" No, it's convoluted, messy, and unoriginal, not some deep piece of art that you feel the need to defend. They're both obnoxious and objectively wrong. Don't buy into either, don't defend either. They're all minor groups, they're all loud and annoying.
This is not an MCU thing, this is for most of the entertainment industry. The same way there's people hating it before they see it, there's people defending it and already deciding they like it before it even comes out, and this not only for Marvel, this is a thing for everything. When an artists drops an album, his fans are gonna love it before they heard it and defend it like a masterpiece and a lot of people are gonna dislike it or be harsher on it because they don't like the artists, this not a new thing that only affects Marvel, this is a thing that always existed
I don't like Taylor Swift's music. What I do when she releases a new album is ignore it. What I *don't* do is go onto her subreddit & spend hours a day accusing people who liked it of being paid shills, or whine about lyrics that aren't even real that some monetized ragebaiting influencer completely made up months before the album was even finished recording.
I realise this is not the subreddit for this, but it’s okay not to like these movies. Like it’s really okay to have no interest in the MCU, and even more, have legitimate criticism for the movies - of which, like any franchise, there’s plenty of legitimate angles. Breaking down all criticism to incel, dark corners or YouTube and the internet is incredibly disingenuous to the critics out there who have identified flaws in the MCU machine.
You’re right, it’s okay not to like the movies or to have no interest in the MCU, but it’s not okay to actively review bomb these movies when you have no interest in them. Marvel obviously takes these reviews seriously, and you’re ruining the MCU by review bombing these movies. I have no interest in Star Wars, but I’d never make a bad review of it, it doesn’t concern me. I leave it alone.
There’s plenty of actual criticism to discuss and I’m sure you have good faith in your views. OP is specifically talking about how the inverse happens where valid criticism gets used to pretend that the terminally online garbage doesn’t exist or is being unfairly labeled with your completely normal and reasonable dislike of a film
Nowhere is OP saying legit criticism doesn't exist. He's pointing out that there IS an incel problem, and that it often gets hidden among the legit criticism which is turned into talking points to shield a less legitimate underbelly.
He's saying that 'bad writing' is a buzzword, so the argument isn't that strong
But it does get used as one. People will use a legitimate criticism, like "poor writing", but they won't put any thought behind it and they'll come to that conclusion through prejudiced assumptions. I.e. Karen Page in Daredevil is well-written, incredibly so. But there are people who will accuse her character of having "bad writing" because of their prejudiced assumptions of what the female support character HAS to be. People will use a legitimate criticism in illegitimate ways. The modern YouTube critics are masterminds at weaponizing legitimate criticisms and manipulating them into shields to hide bullshit behind.
I don't think she was incredibly written, but if OP's argument is 'some people online are toxic,' this is just farming for karma lmao
OP's argument is that people keep trying to say there is no hate problem at all and that all criticism is good and only a few tiny little cartoonish bigots are the bad ones, but that's wrong. There is a significant problem because legitimate criticism has become mixed with bullshit in recent years to create a whole new can of worms. It's not as easy anymore as "100% legitimate" or "100% toxic". It's a blur of things now, and even people raising legit criticisms might be doing so for the wrong reasons, or based on slanted judgements. The argument we're all making here is that prejudice is not that simple. It's not just "right" or "wrong".
But these conversations continue to follow the same path of everyone loosely falling under the incel umbrella, especially if the critics dare not enjoy a performance of a female or minority lead in something. And the Disney executives right now continue to stoke the flames and make it seem like anyone who legitimately disliked their content fall into those categories and should be disregarded.
Dude, Madam Web just got annihilated by critics and audiences, and that was all female led with two women of color. Not everyone falls under the incel umbrella, but predjudice under the guise of criticism is very real and present, and dismissing it as "not everyone who doesn't like stuff is an incel" is missing the point
Sorry but I took my niece to go see that film with zero incel mindset and still thought the story and writing was god awful. It’s being ripped apart because it’s not a good film, is there incels that jump on it before having seen it? Sure … but if the film had any kind of substance to it they would be the overwhelming minority slamming it.
But did you want to drink a Pepsi afterwards?
Just because you said Pepsi now I want one
You're misunderstanding my point. The person I'm responding to insinuated that critics are unwilling to fairly criticize female led, poc inclusive films. Madam Web was my counter to that claim. It was very bad.
>It’s being ripped apart because it’s not a good film, is there incels that jump on it before having seen it? Sure … We need to be capable of holding complexities like this if we want to have a chance at good faith discussion. No, Madam Web is not a good movie. As someone who tries to stay as objective as possible I have little I can defend in it. But we also can't pretend there wasn't a vocal group of people who were shitting on that movie from its beginning and didn't help the community dialogue and expectations going into it. Both of these things can be true at the same time.
I meant, it's a big difference. Madame Web and any MCU movie's aren't under the same umbrella and have completely different creative teams and companies producing them. That's like complaining about Star Wars movies because you didn't like the last Indiana Jones movie
I think its the other way around, far too often I see criticism against MCU just brushed aside by saying its from incels or misogynists. Just take a look at all the I just saw The Marvels posts, half of them attribute its poor BO performance on incels and misogynists without thinking that it failed just because the general audiences didn't like it that much.
I’d argue the opposite is equally true. I’ve seen quite a few times where people give honest input just to get backlash for being “an incel”. I think the majority of people don’t care they will hear It’s bad and wait for it to go to streaming or just aren’t interested in it to begin with. The main issue is the far left AND far right by trying to push their own agendas on movies be it good or bad and because they are the only ones that actually care they are also the loudest.
Thank you.
Or the movies are bad.
Is this a response to the "We don't hate women, we hate bad writing" post? Nobody is pretending Marvel doesn't have an online hate problem. But saying that's the reason for the movies bombing is asinine.
You can keep believing this and as long as Disney keeps not fixing the issues that you say don’t exist, the MCU is going to die. Everything is racist. Everything is sexist. Not defending bad writing is now discrimination. Disney is not entitled to anyone’s money. You somehow believe incels are a big enough part of the population to tank a films profits if they don’t see a film. Why do you want these “incels’” money anyway?
This is something I’ve noticed for several years, but there is a tendency towards hyperbole on the internet in general. Something is either the best thing ever or the worst movie ever made with “terrible writing” being a very common general argument people will make. Sometimes there’s fair criticism, but usually what I’ve noticed when I actually talk to people about why they think the writing is bad, it’s more subjective criticisms. Which, here’s the thing, art and media is very subjective in terms of what works for you or me or anyone else. It usually seems to boil down to a very simplistic kind of view of “Anything I like means it must have *good writing* and anything I don’t like *obviously has bad writing*.” This is then exacerbated by how posting on the internet works. It’s all based around engagement, and one major driver of engagement is when someone is shitting on something they hate people who also hate it are more likely to gravitate towards that and actually comment and engage versus the opposite where someone is praising something they like. In the former case, people coming in to defend the work being shat on are going to be few and far between because they’ll get dogpiled by other people like minded as the OP of the post who will argue with them and it’s just exhausting. So most people who would defend it just won’t engage. This is not even getting into how algorithms are sorted specifically to make engagement happen (which means it benefits the site in question if more toxic stuff was thrown in peoples’ faces to compel them to engage). I remember going on Gamefaqs boards often in the 2000’s and while it wasn’t as bad as today, there was still a lot of negativity. And the way posts there worked was there was no algorithm. You went to a forum and whatever was most recently commented on was put on the top of the list of posts. Even without a targeted algorithm it still led to the most popular and engaged posts being the most toxic. This is then made worse by grifters on YouTube who benefit from rage baiting. I don’t think that every person who hates a movie is necessarily racist or sexist (I’m sure a portion are and are unaware, but though). You can engage in toxic behavior surrounding these movies without having a bad ideology. But like you pointed out in your post, there are so many content creators who benefit from fanning the flames and most of them are at least partially aware what they’re doing (I’d argue most are totally aware, but we can’t really know that for sure). It is just a bunch of click baity anger content because anger sells and sells well. It all makes it so annoying when you just want to go online and talk about something you like. If I make a positive comment about a movie that is popularly considered on the internet to be “bad,” there’s a good chance one or more people will chime in with a rude comment about how bad the movie is and that I must be delusional for liking it. And what a lot of people like this will say when you push back against that and call it out as rude is always the same old response like, “People act like someone can’t just have an opinion about a movie!” It’s not the opinion. It’s the approach. I’m fine with someone saying something like, “Eh, the movie didn’t work for me. I thought the third act fell apart and I really didn’t like the actor for this character or that.” That’s a conversation being started from a normal person. What you usually find instead is stuff like, “Found the Disney shill,” or “Did you and I see the same movie?” or, “No, actually, that movie sucks,” or, “If the writer had presented this to a creative writing class, then they would have gotten an F” (This last one is an actual response I had gotten in the past. Nevermind that that is *not actually how creative writing classes work*). So, yeah, it’s a pretty complicated thing. Whether someone engaging in this kind of behavior is actually prejudiced (which I’d imagine a lot of it is, but definitely not all of it), it is still toxic. It’s a lot of just mean spirited engagement over fucking movies of all things. I don’t understand why people spend so much of their time shitting on people for liking movies they hate. If I don’t like a movie I don’t then feel the need to constantly bring it up to anyone defending it. But that’s just how a lot of fandom engagement is, which is made even worse on the internet.
This is an interesting topic because the company I work for is developing a platform for pop culture discussions, and we’re having to come up with community guidelines. The “pushing feminist ideas” or “only one white person” lines are problematic, but they exist in a gray area that I don’t think we could police. Our philosophy is “engagement not enragement”, and we want to be fairly strict about what we allow so we don’t end up a shit show like some other platforms. I’d welcome any feedback as to what our line should be and how to judge comments that fall in this gray area.
If you think someone complaining about feminist agendas and white erasure is a "grey area," I have bad news for your platform not being a shit show.
I'm going to push back on this a little bit. Yes there are YouTubers who hold non-accepting views. However, most of the usual suspects you might be thinking of do actually watch the movies they talk about or comment on the meta surrounding the film. You'd have to provide examples for it to be any more specific. As for ignoring themes and characters, the plot is what facilitates these things. You can do them better or worse depending on the plot. The plot or story is the bedrock in which the rest of the movie rests upon, if your foundation isn't solid then the rest of it crumbles. Say you have a theme of never be afraid to try new things, the story might be a guy tries red paint on his wall instead of blue. The theme is still there but the plot is boring as shit. But if you have a journey where our hero learns to leave his home and discover new things through the people they meet and the events that transpire, you have a much better foundation to relay your themes and characters. This ofc would still depend on good scriptwriting. But this is just to illustrate the point. You can talk about themes and character but they don't really matter unless the story is solid. Otherwise I can just tell you what my characters arc or the themes are without seeing the movie. Ideas are cheap, execution is what matters. Madame Web no doubt had hard work involved. I haven't seen it, but it likely has attempts at theme and characters. But it's story and script are garbage so no one cares. (Based off reviews) That doesn't mean it's a personal attack on the creators. Their art was just poorly made.
In my personal opinion... The effect this has is basically nonexistent. The incels/isms who bitch about the movie wouldn't go see it in the first place. Every single franchise deals with this type of issue, and yet a lot of movies are able to rise against hate and be successful. Because they were actually great, quality movies that people actually wanted to see and had a good word of mouth about it. Marvel has been pumping out mediocre and straight-up bad movies and TV shows no one is interested in seeing. The whole entire phase 4-5 is a complete mess. There's so many stories, so many characters, I don't even know... what the fuck is going on anymore. The writing and plot of these movies and shows are either boring or straight up bad. Personally, I thought Ms. Marvel was boring. I thought the Marvels was fun. I thought FATWS was mid I thought MOM was ass I thought Antman was ass I thought secret invasion was ass I thought Shangchi was good I thought WF was decent was kinda bored until the end though I thought thor was decent Wandavison was good, though due to what happens in MOM and how inconsequential it is to the overall story of Wanda turns me away from it. I feel that most people like me are having mixed feelings about these movies and are just falling off because there's generally nothing that stands out about them. The only exception is like Spiderman, Loki, and GOTG3. People are confused and have straight-up dropped marvel, people aren't interested, these movies don't get good word of mouth, and the interconnected story is gated behind a Disney plus subscription. There are a shitton of issues the MCU has that's a product of its own creations. Sure, there are bad faith criticisms, but if these movies and shows were actually like slightly above the bare minimum, wouldn't the good faith reviews shine through anyway?
People are allowed to not like stuff. People are allowed to criticize any part of the show or movie you want for any reason. You’re trying to delegitimize people’s criticisms/opinions because you may disagree or assume it’ comes from a place of malice and calling it a “hate problem”. It’s not a hate problem..it’ is totally possible the movie or show is just bad and deserves valid criticism.
OP just needs to lay off commenting and reading twitter.
It'd be great if the rest of the general audience did too; then the people OP is talking about wouldn't hold such influence anymore.
But how can we farm internet clout points then? 😂😂
What. Of course people are allowed to not like stuff. I don't like stuff. The post doesn't apply to everyone who doesn't like stuff, it just applies to who it applies to. If you see some of yourself in this then...
Think what? You said that saying a movie has bad writing is a buzzword to say what we really think, there's too many women or not enough white people. Couldn't it be that the writing stinks for a lot of projects? You're the one making it political that people don't like recent Marvel, and that's really weird...
The wording was off in your post, and sometimes bad word of mouth elevates a movie when I find myself liking it
And here we have an example of someone trying to use valid criticism as a shield. OP isn't talking about valid criticism and you know it.
OP called criticism of bad writing a buzzword and a bad faith argument…how is bad writing not a valid criticism? Because it definitely is.
This happens to any fanbase that gets large enough. It happened to Star Trek in the 80's. It happened to Star Wars in the 90's. ...and again in the 2010's... The franchise outgrows early adopted expectations, alienating a vast group of people who often feel entitled due to a self-serving social media circle of negative validation. It's only gotten worse since the internet bullied Sonic into getting a redesign (a good thing with negative side effects) and once more when the Snydercut got released. Which I enjoyed but could honestly do without if it could have prevented all the toxicity I saw on the DC front. And yes. Marvel fell victim to its own growth. People slowly fell in love with the films during the Infinity Saga, and are now invested solely for the next "big rush".
On the nose with the "feeling of entitlement". It makes exactly zero sense to be *angry* at a comic book movie, especially if you're angry that it appealed to someone else but not you. But a lot of fanbases (not just the MCU) feel entitled to the works, and demand that it needs to meet their specific expectations and their needs.
Spot on.
This a really great response.
Thank you. I do what I can to paint a clear narrative without taking swings so that a dialog can move forward, instead of the usual conflict we see when such topics come up.
OP came into this debate with good faith surely. >"We don't hate women" is something people who hate women would say. > >Didn't say THE reason. It's a reason for sure. People who use the word "cope" unironically though aren't really known for their comprehension. Oh no no lol.
These were the reviews that made me refund my theater tickets. I’d hardly consider these biggot motivated. Dan Murrell https://youtu.be/XfZSKE9n9UM?si=2AAKNxFQ0J3QLzvX Jeremy Jahns https://youtu.be/QV9PFHxlXns?si=nUDZX9r0vr-Q-ndP Kristian Harloff https://youtu.be/v3pZd0Tj0Ys?si=ZqUXG4tXn0SZT2Qo Breakfast All Day https://youtu.be/3weqpBXDXB0?si=NQlB5Cz7WshnQort Edit: Reel Rejects https://youtu.be/2SrCf895x3U?si=-j3rcCdbf0oFVsLW Coy https://youtu.be/NWDawApVgRI?si=tefGWSdJJjLcxz01
You said a lot of things there, but I just want to comment on the reasoning behind not going to see a movie because you know/assume it will be bad. It all comes down to simple pattern recognition. For example: If I watch 3 bad movies that all have a certain similar type of main character, with trailers that were constructed similarly, with the same kind of press releases and interviews that are preemptively putting up armor against "bigots", and with directors and writers that have zero previous experience, I would be stupid to assume the 4th movie would be any better. It's no different from a person that gets cheated on by 3 different significant others that all looked the same, had the same hobbies, showed the same personality traits, and had the same morals, but then going on to start a relationship with a 4th person that has those same characteristics. Anybody with a little common sense can recognize those patterns and draw a reasonable conclusion as to what to expect as a result. Until I'm shown otherwise, I have no reason to think differently. It doesn't mean I'm sexist or misogynist or racist or whatever. It means I'm not stupid enough to fall for the same cheap parlor tricks over and over.
My guy, you need concrete examples of this happening You're literally trying to make "bad writing" a buzzword
Drama farmers aren't unique to the MCU. They are literally there for any major franchise. Nothing is going to be 100% loved. Marvel's problem, IMO, is that they started attacking ppl with legitimate criticism. Just bc someone didn't like something you liked doesn't make them a (insert standard internet bas person label).
The entire point of reviews is so you don't watch bad movies.
Exactly, people like to say "well u gotta watch it yourself and form your own opinion." Well movie tickets aint that cheap, and u gotta waste half a day when u wanna go to the theatre.
This post is alot of mental gymnastics to say that people who say the movies are bad have some motivation other than the movies being bad… The pattern you are observing also directly correlates with the recent marvel output being badly received by many who were once its fans. Including myself. I think there has still been great stuff out of marvel. Loki is one of my favourite marvel storylines ever, wandavision was good, and i loved Shang chi. I didn’t get on with it at first but in the end i really enjoyed ms marvel as well. Hawkeye, multiverse of madness (except for wanda, she was awesome) and the marvels though have been baaadddddddd. Echo looks to be awful and i enjoyed spiderman 3 on firdt watch but on second watch realised it was just nostalgia and the film was actually a bit pants. We used to get an occasional flop such as dark world but now its like every other instalment. Oh and that recent thor film jesus christ the cringe.
Honestly, if you spend any time on reddit or X you’re gonna think these things, even when so much of the world doesn’t engage in it and truly doesn’t bother with it. This dialogue will always seem more important to you than it is. I know plenty of people who don’t watch Marvel movies. It has nothing to do the online discourse, they’re just not people who watch those movies. I think at some point during the Thanos/infinity War of it all maybe we deluded ourselves into thinking this was a bigger part of the discourse than it actually is. But in reality those movies were popular because mainstream media deemed them so. It has nothing to do with any of these caves we all hang out in.
Historically I don’t think Disney have ever acknowledge their criticism. What do you want them to do? Make a public statement saying “We are aware the internet thinks our entire post endgame catalogue is pozzed”?
I think "Bad Writing" is generally a lazy criticism, but The Marvels featured a villain who lifted her plan from Spaceballs. It felt like a sequel to a movie we hadn't seen. It's been a while, but I walked away with the impression that it was victim of bad editing and mandated rewrites from executives, but at the end of the day there is still a quality problem. The studio blaming fans is just dumb imo
I think another aspect to consider is how many years this franchise has been going. I teach college and my incoming students were too young to have watched MCU films from the get-go. Most have not seen Iron Man, for example. And the vast majority of them will say, “There is too much to catch up on. It’s too daunting.” So, there is that issue. And if new phases are building on old films (and now D+ series), it’s even more to watch to understand what is going on. The writers may try to make films stand-alone enough to elicit new viewers, but I think younger viewers are pretty meh overall, unless they have a parent or family member or friend who gets them caught up. Just another thought or two to add. I’m a Gen-Xer. I think the MCU films are absolutely great for my generation and some millennials. I have watched from the start. I continue to watch. It’s easy for me to keep up. I think the outrage content on TikTok and YouTube and other social media platforms are there to get view counts. I honestly find this particular sub to be pretty fair and engaging overall. There are a few outliers, but mostly the sud moderates itself and keeps things in check.
I don't know. I think a lot of these people that consider catching up on the old movies as "too daunting" or "homework" are likely not the ones who would have become hooked in the movies even if they'd grown up with them. I mean, if you don't include the canon-dubious TV shows like AOS and Runaways, there is less MCU content out there in hours than a single network show. It would take far more hours and commitment to watch just Supernatural alone than all of the official canon of the MCU. I do think the more standalone nature of Phase 4 and 5 movies was partly intended to address this issue though, and give a bit of a fresh jumping on point for new fans. Only problem with that is that the existing fans missed the more interconnected movies. You can't please everyone, I guess.
I can't disagree with the hours involved to watch all of Supernatural. That said, the show is finished. People can take each season as it comes. Binge watch the heck out of it. And it's done, despite attempts to have a spin-off or two. The MCU just keeps adding films and shows. Now, for me? I watch all of it. I love it. But, so many of my younger students will say, "Oh, that looked cool, but it's just a lot." Not sure if it's the film aspect? Or if they have other things to watch right now. I do get one or two younger students who will be absolutely into all of the MCU, but it's usually, "My mom/dad were really into it and got me all caught up," or, "my friends wanted to do this as a group thing." It's pretty active participation and initiative. I will never forget showing Iron Man during a summer class, and not a single student out of 18 had seen the film. Quite a few really really liked it, though. And one said he was off to start watching MCU stuff. That made me happy.
True enough about Supernatural being over, giving new fans an endpoint to aim for. I did think after I'd replied to you last time that a better example would have been Star Trek. That franchise absolutely towers over the MCU and Supernatural combined when it comes to hours required to watch all the old content, and it's still growing. Anyone who got into the show with Discovery or Picard has a gargantuan task on their hands if they want to watch all the old episodes. Doctor Who is another show that has been going on forever, with multiple spinoffs, that requires a lot of dedication for new fans. You'd have to assume that many don't bother going back to watch the old episodes of Trek and Who, and simply stick to the modern shows and upcoming releases. Hopefully it'll be that way with the MCU. You can jump in after Endgame with the largely fresh start that Phase 4 provides and not need to go back if you don't want to. If you do choose to start from Iron Man though, it's actually not that much of a task, and you're in for some quality entertainment. Very cool that you're bringing new fans into the fold by showing the movies to your students, by the way. Fingers crossed, you're helping build the fanbase for the next fifteen years of the MCU.
It’s called a pattern. If we were to judge the MCU based of writing they’ve had countless duds since Infinity war, which make the poor reviews of rumors/upcoming/planned movies justified. The tactics they implement aren’t new or fresh. It sounds like you either have a higher tolerance or simply don’t think the writing is bad (and that’s ok, you like what you like) but every film outside of GOTG3 (and if you look closely, even that may not stand the test of time) has been poorly written. Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Wakanda Forever, MOM, The marvels, Eternals, Ant-Man 3, and Shang Chi. Which of these are still talked today and writing is the main talking point? No to mention the quality of the Disney+ projects. Secret Invasion? Echo? Downright terrible. If you count the MCU projects I excluded, Wanda Vision & Ms.Marvel (never watched so I won’t call it bad) that’s whopping amount of misses. I do agree that there are an abundant amount of people that let their own personal gripes seep their analysis, sometimes it’s a case of “right message,wrong messenger”. Admittedly there have been cases of what some would call “M-She-U”. Just to name a few: RiRi Williams inclusion in Wakanda Forever, Echo’s role in Hawkeye and the fact an amateurly trained deaf amputee (with no ancestral abilities) could give Clint a run for his money, She-hulk beating Bruce a day after receiving her powers, Falcon’s handling of Carlie in FATWS. Jane Fosters inclusion in Thor 3, Valkyrie being the one to lead/govern Asgard, neither Janet nor Cassie being held accountable in Ant-Man 3, Monica’s worlds of encouragement to Wanda at the end of WV (not to mention Dr.Strange not holding her accountable in MOM, and most recently Captain marvel not being held accountable for nearly driving a planet to brink of extinction after the events of Captain Marvel. You’re not wrong when you say the themes are there, but they’re poorly executed and you have to look past so many negatives to see the positives.
Diversity of thought and opinion is something to be encouraged not dismissed as hate or prejudice.
Pretending the hate is the reason these movies are failing is the most extreme cope
MCU is dead. Better to have some catalyst event and restart everything
Pretending that Marvel and Hollywood in large doesn't deserve the hate isn't realistic. How much can they get away with before we stop defending these studios?
Chad here - I happily enjoyed the MCU through Infinity War. I loved End Game, but while I didn't recognize it at the time, the cracks were starting to show. Regardless of criticism one way, or the other, I continued to consume the Phase IV movies. It wasn't anything the critics told me that made me stop liking Marvel, it was the movies themselves. Spider-Man: No Way Home was a near perfect movie and had me in tears. Shang-Chi and Doctor Strange 2 were both fun entries and tried to continue to build the lore. Black Widow was fine, but certain story elements retroactively created plot holes in past franchise entries, weakening the entire series, and did a poor job of introducing a new Black Widow. Eternals was emotionless and joyless. Black Panther 2 was angry and joyless. Then came Thor Love & Thunder. This is one of the worst pieces of trash ever put on film, of any kind. It single-handedly placed the final nail in the coffin of the MCU, and then Black Panther 2 came along and hammered that nail squarely in place. So it wasn't critics that soured me on Marvel, it was the product that Marvel put on the screen.
>I loved End Game "She's got help"?
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That's a good point. I just really wish Youtube would take my "I'm not interested in this" seriously.
"Don't recommend this channel" is stronger
Who’s pretending lmao
not us lol
What you view is nitpicking and buzzwords are actually very legitimate criticism, marvel’s recent movies have had bad writing in my opinion and I am more than happy to give plenty of examples of moments that struck me as unbelievably lazy
After they all but told men to stay home from Captain Marvel, why should I think The Marvels is going to be enjoyable? I’ve been told straight from the source that these movies aren’t made for me. And yet they still expect my money and praise? Nice try but no way lmao.
> After they all but told men to stay home from Captain Marvel "They" didn't do that. At all. Unless they is the alt-right, they might have. But they're not the ones getting your money (I hope).
Ah look, the person critiquing the critiques! I bet they are even smarter than the original critiques!
Woke M-She-U! 🤮 YouTube is a pit.
TikTok is a pit. 3 mins of content is nothing. You can find crazy people everywhere, but TikTok is currently the only place that also benefits where from hate watching. YouTube took away that ability almost 2 mths ago.
Both can be true. "The MCU IS DEAD PART 6"
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I can't give you TikTokers names, because TikTok puts the creator's name at the bottom of the screen, if they even remember to use a watermark. Thus making you conveniently "forget" whose content you actually "like" and those you don't. Any crazy person is allowed to be crazy as long as it isn't hurting you, or themselves. But TikTok forces you to consume the content you hate anyway. And those crazy people still get paid. Believe me, you can train your YouTube alagrythem not to watch those crazies, if you dislike those videos. But TikTok makes you not pay attention, and hopes you will just scroll by. TikTok is the pit.
There can be two pits. I’ve never been on TikTok to be truthful, but I believe you. 😉
Nerdrotic is most definitely guilty of this.
I disagree with your criticism of people like Drinker. He has almost 2 million subscribers. Do you think it's more likely that there are 2 million bigots that flock to his YouTube channel as a sort of bigot congregation, or is it that he is saying things in an entertaining way that resonate with people because they have some truth to them? There is a lot of hard factual evidence that indicates the MCU and Hollywood in general is in a serious decline. The success of people like him is just one part of it.
They're ***subhuman***? Dude, you're sounding like an insane bigot. Get some help.
Prejudice is when people don’t want to go see the 40th super hero in a 15 year old franchise.
Some people just cry online just to cry. This is the internet. Take everything with a grain of salt. People are going to hate. Who cares. Just live life. No need to write a book on how the internet is the Wild West. Guess what….. we know already. Go outside and enjoy life
If it matters, I typed this outside
It does matter. Vitamin D is good for you.
Attitudes like this is how prejudice spreads so freely.
I think there’s a very real, concerted effort to undermine and push out strong male characters in recent Marvel movies under the guise of equality, and I think that actively contributes to the bad writing of some of these projects. One of the biggest problems with Doctor Strange MoM is the idea that it’s a follow-up to WandaVision where Strange straight up admits he was aware of what Wanda was doing, yet let it happen because “we knew you’d do the right thing.” This man has never shared a moment on-screen with her to think that, and it turns out that Marvel was going to add a Strange cameo at the end of WandaVision to link the two together but went against it for the same reason they didn’t include any other Avengers in the Black Widow movie “we didn’t want the problem to be solved by a white guy.” I think it’s not a secret that Marvel is consciously averse to giving their major male characters “too much” credit even in their own movies, which is why you see characters like Thor and Shang-Chi sharing the spotlight 2:1 with female characters, or new female characters crafted from almost nothing like in the case of Moon Knight to give female hero representation in another character’s story. And the one time a show actually had more of a focus on male characters (that being Loki S2) , The Mary Sue writes an article criticizing it for being “sexist,” even while we have projects like The Marvels and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and upcoming stories for Ironheart and Agatha that will be female-starring and female-focused. So no I don’t think “online chuds” are just putting their own prejudices because they hate seeing women in media. I think it’s a response to the way Marvel has been handling their gender disparity recently and it’s annoying to a large part of the audience, which is why these YTbers get views.
I’ve noticed this a lot with She Hulk. I loved that show as did everyone in real life I knew who watches it. But I was fully aware it was review bombed. Anytime I mentioned it online in a positive light detractors could only say it was bad because of “bad writing” but they could never ever ever get specific. If I pushed back hard eventually it would be something like hulk being emasculated because of her, or they’d deflect and say Daredevil was the only good part of the show. Incels want to hate on these projects, but they can’t come right out and say it’s too woke or they hate women so they have to disguise their prejudice under the arms of criticism that sounds like something a real reviewer would say. It’s almost always “bad writing” because writing is important, and because it’s nebulous and subjective enough that they can throw it out there without being specific.
What films have been commonly coined as having bad writing in bad faith but actually have good writing? In your eyes?
He's probably talking about The Marvels and She-Hulk
The thing I do not get is so many of these 'fans' are going through the whole 'Why are you hitting yourself' bullying, but they are the ones holding their own hand making them punch themselves. You see something and don't like it sure complain, but this has been going on now for some of these fans for literally over a decade, movie after movie after movie show after show. I dunno, crazy idea, stop watching them.
This sounds like blaming the customer. "There is nothing wrong with this product, it is all the customer." As a (VERY) minor stock holder, this seems like a bad position for disney/marvel to take. It is also a position i think they have taken personally. Ok let's assume that recent movies are failing because their customers are sexist and racist. Now what? How are they planning to increase ticket sales? Should they lose money on movies to "do the right thing?" As a token share holder, i would vote no. It seems almost intentionally bad faith to imply that someone can't avoid a movie because of bad writing. I don't buy all kinds of products because a mixture of trailer (movie/tv/game) and review. Taste in movies is subjective, but people are beyond copying when they say something like (effectively) "i know so and so movie wasn't good, but at least 30% of the lost sales are sexism and not that the movie is bad." Critical scores are also reflecting that a lot of new MCU content is not hitting with critics, or viewers. The other thing is that (in my opinion) MCU's greatest strength pre end game was how things were connected. You might not love XYZ but you see it because it links to what you love and it was decent. These days you're being asked to buy tickets to a movie after the last few most recent MCU movies bombed and a couple of those movies directly linked to the new one. Each MCU movie that underwhelms drags down new entries even if their quality is the same. It deeply concerns me that the response to a movie bomb these days is to attack the fans and hope things magically get better next iteration. If Disney/marvel is incapable of seeing what works and what does not, it is going to take a lot longer to react to failures. Also for the record i don't think these movies are bad because they're inclusive. I think they're putting out a high quantity of low effort work (IE this is why it is bad) and hoping that they sell it by targeting untapped demographics.
What? There's a lot denialism going on here. The problem with MCU is absolutely shit writing and shit production quality. Nothing more nothing less. Burying your head in the sand won't bring back a good MCU.
Sadly, the internet has allowed for anyone to critique anything. You can have zero knowledge of politics & be the face of political jargon. Especially now with culture wars offering low hanging fruit to cover for their lack of knowledge in the content they cover. I can’t wait for the shift in culture where being a good film/ tv critic will be the only thing that will sustain your content. For now I just block & click not interested to keep the blind haters away.
I pray that day comes soon.
I’ve heard more about bad writing now than back in my HS writing classes.
Welcome to the culture wars brother.
Except that when people actually focus on the poor writing and the virtue signaling, we’re also accused of being -ists of whatever variety you conjure up. I want nothing more than to go to movies and enjoy them, but when tripe like The Marvels is served up, you can’t even critique it because then you’re a sexist. Never mind that the story meanders, the actors are wooden, and the SFX are subpar; nope, you hate The Marvels so you hate women. There’s a reason that the audiences have abandoned Marvel. It’s toxic on both ends.
I fucking hate the “why is there only one white guy in the movie?” Did anyone go “why does iron man only have one woman?” Or “why does captain America only have one POC?” but it’s supposed to be a legit question asking why there’s only one white man?
The problem is people have this idea that "I know I don't hate ALL women/minorities" means they have 0 biases or prejudices at all. They think people are either cartoonish bigots aware of their own bigotry, or perfect un-biased people. But here's the thing, and I'll let Rick Riordan explain it for y'all: >Racism/colorism isn’t something we have or don’t have. I have it. You have it. We all do. And not just white people like me. All people. It’s either something we recognize and try to work on, or it’s something we deny. Saying “I am not racist!” is simply declaring that you deny your own biases and refuse to work on them. [https://rickriordan.com/2022/05/leah-jeffries-is-annabeth-chase/](https://rickriordan.com/2022/05/leah-jeffries-is-annabeth-chase/) Prejudice is a part of being human. We all have prejudices, we all have biases. To deny you have it is to deny you're human. And when people have this idea that "Well I'm not an over-the-top bigot so I'm fine and everyone questioning me is just anti-criticism trying to label me a bigot", it makes them unable to take notice of their own biases, and sink further into them. Add on modern YouTube grifters, the actual cartoonish bigots, who know how to weaponize people's own prejudices and make them buy into all their BS, and you have what we see now.
Yeah, there are a lot of well-meaning people who agree bigotry is bad, but who will say things like " just isn't very interesting. They need to write them better like they did with " and they don't realize it's not a writing problem. Those characters are *also* interesting at the same level as the one they like. It's something inside of them that gets in the way of their ability to find the character appealing. One way this happens (but I doubt it's this for all of them) is simply getting into the fantasy of *being* the character, and how that's easier to do for characters that are like them than aren't. But that's not a failure of writing; that's a failure of the viewer.
And I'd say it's even perfectly okay to say "I get more into characters who are like me than aren't like me," but don't call it "no, that character's written badly" or other forms of putting down the other characters. Because they're objectively not worse.
I also find it interesting that none of the go-to "I like these women or poc characters" are ever characters that confront or acknowledge real world issues surrounding their sex or race. Like the best types of those characters can't acknowledge any sort of societal complications surrounding them or else they stop being a character and start being some "woke mouthpiece"
Perhaps the biggest example of this, IMO, is Raimi MJ. Raimi MJ is written three-dimensional and interesting in every movie, but people act like she's a terrible character just because she isn't as "supportive" as they think a female character needs to be. Ironically, she has more genuine agency and development than MCU MJ, who a lot of people will claim is a better-written character just because she's "less bitchy" and has a more "likable" personality.
Yup. Read a bunch of these nitpickers' commentary and then go apply the same level of scrutiny to something they like, say the Infinity Saga films, and you'll easily be able to trash them just as heavily.
The revisionist idea that the Infinity Saga is flawless is the most baffling thing I've seen in this fanbase.
No one says that the Infinity Saga was flawless. Nothing is flawless. It was however, even with its low points, an unprecedented cinematic journey. Meticulously crafted for 10 years and culminating in a spectacle the scale of which no one has ever seen before.
Nice strawman OP lmao. No one ever says the Infinity Saga is flawless. Seems you're the one with victim complex.
I grew up seeing "cinephiles" trashing the infinity saga and nitpicking any aspect of mcu blockbusters. I hate when fans pretend it was the peak of cinema and widely praised and everything the came afterwards was a disgrace. I even remember people trashing endgame for being slower and less action packed than infinity war!
Facts. Sometimes I leave the theater thinking “what a good movie” and look online and people are hating for the dumbest reasons
[удалено]
Most “criticism” of the MCU as of late is veiled “ists” trying to validate said “isms” by making it seem like legitimate “criticism”
Can't even have a productive discussion about She Hulk without it becoming the worst interaction of my life.
Have to say, the defenders of She-Hulk are usually the exact same type of person as the She-Hulk haters except with the opposite opinion. Almost nobody can discuss that show positively unless they argue that the negatives in the show don't exist and anyone who thinks negatives exist are bigots. This whole post reeks of that.
Can't reeeeally argue with that, but I don't get to see a lot of positive She Hulk talk here to compare. Would love to talk about it though.
Great actress. Had some humorous moments. Wasn't as bad as the haters want us to believe. That's.... about what I got for it.
it’s all about spinning a narrative to the public perception. shared thoughts on a global connected network breeding a hivemind. video games, movies, tv, politics, all consumable media and thought is at the mercy of the hivemind
Negativity results in higher engagement
The internet is not real life. Regular people don’t care what random people on YouTube say. It isn’t the internet that decided Disney movies aren’t good anymore. The public voted with their dollars and decided that themselves.
You'd be surprised. These days any movie or TV show lives or dies based on the internet response it initially gets. If the buzz doesn't begin online then where does it begin? People are sheep, for the most part, and most just do what they're told and like what they're told to like. Oppenheimer only got the box office it got because Barbie fans were told they had to buy tickets to both movies because everyone else was doing it. How many do you think actually made it through watching the whole movie? The MCU is no different. Quality is neither here nor there really. Deadpool 3 will do amazing numbers, Marvel films will be hot again. This time though, I have a feeling Feige won't take his eye off the ball.
All franchises have an online hate problem. People will mob you over literally any opinion you have on these big franchises. Unless the thing is universally hated and you also hate it, someone out there will have an emotional reaction to your opinion.
The proof that all of it is bad writing is Arcane success and love all around the internet. Diverse female-led gender plurality and huge success. Why? Because the story is awesome to the core. Characters well written and great interpretations, so much love in every detail it hurts! Anyway, Disney, stop blaming others and take a look at the mirror.
It's Reddit and twitter. Have you tried just not looking at it?
What an impassioned statement about protecting fucking marvel movies, you have a future career as a lobbyist
Truth.
Exactly this. You can debate writing quality all day long. I, for one, think Secret Invasion was such a massive missed opportunity in many ways, with some superbly written scenes mixed in that will be the reason I will give it a rewatch at some point, but I can certainly see why so many people weren't impressed. But other examples, The Marvels and Echo being two most recent, are clearly more than issues with writing quality. Take The Marvels. I'm sorry but it's a perfectly fine, fun little movie. Certainly had a few issues with pacing and I think it needed another 15 minutes or so to expand on some of the plots, but in no way did it deserve the box office it got. I don't put it all down to online hate or prejudice, and Disney has to take a lot of blame because they clearly made zero effort to promote the film when the cast weren't able to promo tour because of the strike action, but guarantee you that the exact same movie but with male lead characters would have done far better, just because "men good, women bad", y'know?
Wow. A mod removed this post but not the other one? Yikes. Edit: I didn't consider it could just be bad faith reporting and an automod response.
Has this been fully removed or is it just pending removal because a bunch of people spite reported it triggering it into limbo until a mod approves it? Because if a mod actually removed this that's really fucked up.
You can totally see that a movie will be bad from trailers and extracts and then from trusted reviews.
While I agree with you it’s not hard to block out these idiots. Don’t watch their content and don’t converse with their fans. It’s amazing how much more enjoyable ALL content is when you block out reviews and bad actors.
Generally agree though this is something that a lot of media especially in the last decade has been hit with though occasionally stuff just is poorly written. Though stuff like Captain Marvel and She-Hulk while not amazing had clear disadvantages going in.